Mondo Knows Facts

China's FAST telescope has the largest single dish

Its 500 metre reflector sits in a natural karst basin in Guizhou The Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope, completed in 2016, uses a dish of 4,450 triangular panels suspended over a limestone depression in Guizhou province. The surface is adjusted by thousands of cables so that a 300 metre illuminated patch focuses on a moving point in the sky. It has detected hundreds of pulsars and listens for faint radio signals. It sits in Mondo's records & extremes collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

National Astronomical Observatories of China

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

Go further

More facts like this

Tags: telescopes, china, astronomy

China's FAST telescope has the largest single dish: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?
Its 500 metre reflector sits in a natural karst basin in Guizhou. The figure is taken from National Astronomical Observatories of China, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a records & extremes fact?
Yes. It sits on the Records & Extremes shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?
The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.