Observatory, founded 2016
Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST)
FAST is the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, a 500 m dish in Guizhou, China. It has found more than 1,300 pulsars in its first decade.
- Location
- Dawodang depression, Pingtang County, Guizhou
- Focus
- Stars, Gravitational waves, Galaxies, Telescopes and missions
- Coordinates
- 25.653, 106.857
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, built into a natural karst depression in Guizhou province, China. Construction began in 2011, FAST saw first light in September 2016 and it was declared fully operational on January 11, 2020. The construction cost was about CN¥1.2 billion (about US$180 million).
Flagship instruments
- The 500-meter dish: an active surface of 4,500 panels that reshape themselves to focus on different parts of the sky.
- Sensitivity: the huge collecting area is what makes faint, distant pulsars detectable.
Recent results
FAST’s first discoveries were two pulsars, detected on August 22 and 25, 2017. Ten years after first light, the count has passed 1,300 pulsars, more than all other telescopes combined found over the same period (as of September 2026). FAST marked its tenth anniversary on September 26, 2026, with 13 papers in Science and Nature to its name.
Pulsars, the spinning neutron stars first identified in 1967-1968, are precise natural clocks. A binary pulsar found in 1974 gave the first indirect evidence of gravitational waves, and arrays of millisecond pulsars produced the 2023 evidence for a gravitational-wave background, announced by NANOGrav together with European, Indian, Australian and Chinese teams.
What to watch, 2026-2030
Our sources list no dated FAST milestones for 2026-2030. The thing to watch is its growing pulsar catalog: every new millisecond pulsar adds a clock that timing arrays can use.
Why scientists are converging here
Pulsar work is gaining attention. In our Research Pulse count of astro-ph abstracts, “pulsar timing” rose from 136 to 151 papers between the six months to March 2026 and the six months to September 2026, and “fast radio burst” from 118 to 160. These counts measure attention, not results. FAST’s sensitivity puts it at the center of stellar remnant studies and of gravitational-wave work alongside NANOGrav and the SKA Observatory.
