The nation’s massive 500m wide dish, based in south west China’s Guizhou Province, is the largest in the world and could be a scientists’ best hope of finding alien life. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) was turned on in 2016 and is made up of 4,450 panels. Experts have been using FAST to scan the universe to search for life.
Shortly after it was turned on, researchers may have found what they are looking for – strange signals which of extra-terrestrial origin.
Li Di, chief scientist of FAST and leader of the radio astronomy division of its operator, the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NOAC) in Beijing, said: “Some strange signals have been found, but it’s hard to confirm their origins, because these signals do not repeat.
“We look for not only television signals, but also atomic bomb signals. We’ll give full play to our imaginations when processing the signals.
“It’s a complete exploration, as we don’t know what an alien is like.”
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This excited China and the rest of the world, with prominent Chinese science-fiction author Liu Cixin claiming that the discovery of aliens was imminent.
He writes in the postscript to one of his books: “Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent.
“But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.”
However, other experts were keen to point out a more logical explanation – fast radio bursts (FRBs).
Scientists have been on the hunt for FRBs since they first detected one in 2007.
Since that first one was discovered, scientists have found dozens more, but new research says these mysterious signals could be pinging around the universe every second.
Experts are still unsure exactly what these signals are, but what they do know is that they can emit as much energy in a second than the sun does in 10,000 years.
They are exceptionally difficult to study as they can last as little as a millisecond and there is no way to predict when they are coming.