On May 29th, at the invitation of Professor Zhang Xin from the School of Science, Researcher Li Di, the Chief Scientist of Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) at China's national observatory, led a team to visit the school and brought a wonderful public science popularization report to students in NEU. The public science presentation was held in Room 207 of Architecture Hall, with the theme of "Galileo Planck and FAST - Cosmic Antenna", and Professor Zhang Xin presided over the presentation. Nearly 200 teachers and students attended the presentation.
Researcher Li first reviewed the development of astronomy and physics from the Galileo telescope that initiated modern astronomical observation to Planck's concept of quantization; then he introduced an important direction of current astronomical research --- the detection of the dynamic universe and focused on fast radio bursts (FRBs), a mysterious and extreme phenomenon in astronomy.
In the presentation, Researcher Li introduced the many achievements of FAST in the field of FRB detection, including obtaining the world's largest collection of FRB explosion events and proposing a unified mechanism for FRB polarization evolution, demonstrating FAST's unique advantages in deep monitoring and precise measurement. The concept of the recently proposed "Cosmic Antenna" computational phase-field telescope is also introduced, which is expected to achieve unprecedented real-time observation of a 10000 square degree super large sky area.
After the presentation, researcher Li had a mutual communication with the participating students and teachers.
It is reported that the FAST telescope, known as the "Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope", located in Guizhou, is the largest radio antenna built by mankind. Since its official operation in 2020, FAST has made a number of important discoveries. As the Chief Scientist, Li's major achievements include: the first detection of interstellar molecular oxygen; the naming of the hydrogen narrow-line self-absorption method, based on which the interstellar magnetic field is measured accurately, which was featured on the cover of Nature; and the pioneering of the first high-time-frequency noise injection technique, which multiplies the efficiency of FAST sky survey. Dr Li has published more than 300 journal articles, including 8 articles in Nature or Science. He was awarded the Third National Innovation Prize, and was honored as the Science and Technology Person of the Year by China News Weekly in 2023. Two scientific research achievements were selected as "China's Top 10 Science Advances" in 2021 and 2022 and "China's Top 10 Science and Technology Advances News" in 2022.
The public science presentation showed the outstanding contribution and broad prospect of FAST to all teachers and students, and let them appreciate the infinite charm of the frontier research in astronomy.
