KRAKOW, Poland, Aug. 18 (Xinhua) -- China's growing radio astronomy capacity, led by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), can help scientists tackle some of astronomy's biggest unanswered questions, renowned Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan has said.
"FAST has already been playing a really decisive role in investigating properties of pulsars," Wolszczan said in a recent interview with Xinhua.
Wolszczan's observations led to the first confirmed discovery of planets outside the solar system more than three decades ago, and he spent years using the Arecibo radio telescope, once regarded as one of the world's best instruments for studying pulsars.
After Arecibo ceased operations, FAST has taken over much of that role, he said.
"FAST is now the pulsar radio telescope," Wolszczan said, describing it as "bigger, more sensitive" than Arecibo and able to follow a source in the sky for longer.
FAST, also known as the "China Sky Eye," has discovered 1,284 pulsars, more than half the combined number discovered by other telescopes worldwide over the same period.
Asked what he would study if he had FAST at his disposal, Wolszczan identified three areas: searching for more planets around neutron stars, detecting magnetic fields around planets beyond the solar system, and looking for planets orbiting white dwarfs.
The search for magnetic fields around exoplanets is the most compelling of the three, "because that directly relates to life and possibilities for life to exist elsewhere," he said.
Scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets, but have yet to definitively detect a magnetic field around any of them, Wolszczan said. Such fields can help protect planets from harmful particles emitted by their stars and may therefore play an important role in determining whether life can survive.
FAST has "a chance to be a very important telescope" in efforts to detect the faint radio signals that could reveal planetary magnetic fields, Wolszczan said, citing its size as a key advantage.
He said he will also continue searching for planets orbiting neutron stars to understand why systems like the one he discovered decades ago appear so rare.
Wolszczan will also look for planets around white dwarfs, the remnants of stars that have reached the end of their evolution, to answer the question of "how, if at all, planetary systems can survive stellar evolution."
The question is also relevant to the solar system's distant future. As stars such as the sun evolve, surrounding planets can be radically transformed or destroyed. Wolszczan described understanding what ultimately happens to such planetary systems as "a very interesting scientific and philosophical question."
China is also constructing the QiTai Radio Telescope (QTT), with an aperture of 110 meters, in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The fully steerable telescope is expected to become the world's largest of its kind when completed in 2028.
China's expanding array of technologies is a powerful addition to the broader pool of instruments that scientists worldwide can use to explore unanswered questions, Wolszczan pointed out. "The global community needs China," he said.
