The construction of a fully steerable 110-m aperture radio telescope, also known as the QiTai radio Telescope (QTT), kicked off on September 21 in Qitai County of China's northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The QTT project will build a 110-m aperture fully steerable radio telescope with superior performance and highly reliable operating states that combines highly efficient observation parameters. The telescope will be built by Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory (XAO) of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) over a period of six years.
With its high sensitivity and unprecedented diameter, QTT will be able to survey three-quarters of the sky, including the centre of the Galaxy and south of the galactic centre.
QTT is expected to make significant contributions to scientific investigations in several science frontiers, such as the discovery of more fast radio bursts, and the research of the dark matter, black holes, gravitational waves, celestial bodies and the origins of life in the universe.
As a major national science and technology infrastructure in astronomy, QTT will also provide strong technical support for China's deep space exploration.
Design model of the fully steerable 110-m aperture radio telescope (Image by DU Jieya)
As well as hunting for signals from alien life, the largest and most sensitive radio telescope ever built will search for extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, which have magnetic fields like Earth, within 100 light-years from Earth. Astronomers from countries including Chi...
China is to have a new radio telescope to "listen" to the universe. Proposed by the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory, the world's largest fully steerable single-dish radio telescope will be built in Qitai County in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
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