Go back
An optional way for Searching Aliens using Radio Telescope
In 2016, China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) – thelargest single-aperture radio telescope in the world – gathered its first light. Since then, thetelescope has undergone extensive testing and commissioning and officially went onlinein Jan of 2020. In all that time, it has also been responsible for multiple discoveries, includingclose to one hundred new pulsars.According to a recent study by an international team of scientists that FAST might haveanother use as well: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)! The team includedmembers from the FAST Collaboration, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), theUniversity of California Berkeley, the Swinburne University of Technology, BreakthroughInitiatives, the SETI Institute, and multiple universities. With a primary surface measuring500 m (1640 ft) in diameter – and a maximum effective aperture of 300 m (984 ft), FAST iscurrently the largest radio telescope in the world and can access a much larger region of thesky than the Arecibo radio telescope. Another major advantage is the fact that FAST isequipped with a 19-beam focal-plane feed horn receiver array, which greatly enhances itsfield of view. Compare this to the 7 beams of Arecibo and the 13 beams of the Parkes RadioTelescope, both of which have provided unprecedented speed for SETI surveys andefficiency in filtering out radio frequency interference (RFI) from Earth-bound sources. TheFAST telescope also benefits from being equipped with the latest in computing hardware,software, and networking. In addition to blind search, FAST will target TESS planets and theAndromeda galaxy. In terms of equivalent isotropic radiation power (EIRP), FAST will besensitive enough to detect any human-like technologies on TESS planets, i.e., a world withslightly more powerful radar than that of Arecibo. At the distance of Andromeda, FAST candetect Kardashev type II or any civilization more powerful.