World's Largest Solar Telescope Array Is Now Complete
The venture planned to dive deep into space, from the permanently shadowed regions of the moon to the flying objects in the asteroid; China is progressing to explore the things of the area. Beijing took a step ahead to facilitate one more facility to explore the universe. The ring of telescopes is ready to disclose the secrets of the Sun.
China has accomplished the task of Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT) on the Tibetan Plateau. The trial is expected to begin in June of next year. The project of building the Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope cost $14 million. The objective of the commodity is to observe the Sun and explore its effects on space and Earth's environment.
The telescope contains a network of 313 dishes that is spanning six meters wide which will be used to study the Sun. With a circumference of 3.14 kilometers, the telescope will image the Sun in radio waves and observe the significant eruptions and the stars' changing activity in our solar system.
The telescope has been developed as part of the ground-based space environment that has an objective to monitor the network dubbed the Chinese Meridian Project (Phase II). The project is also inclusive of the Mingantu interplanetary scintillation telescope, which is being assessed in Inner Mongolia with 100 dishes in a three-arm spiral arrangement.
The focus of the Daocheng telescope will be on understanding the mechanisms that cause the Coronal Mass Ejections which come right after a star throws out a flare or a sudden and bright burst of radiation that can extend far out into space. Coronal mass ejection is one of the most significant eruptions for the Sun's surface.
The large arrays of the telescope will be helpful in enabling it to capture weaker signals from high-energy particles. According to Jingye Yan, the chief engineer of DSRT at the National Space Science Center, we can forecast whether and when coronal mass ejections will reach Earth.
The Tibetan plateau has the motive to establish the telescope since it is the highest plateau on Earth, with an average elevation of over 4,000 meters. This elevation helps in facilitating photometric conditions for the observation, with an extremely arid climate and clear local sky.
Stellar Explosions
Radio telescopes like DSRT help observe the activities of the Sun in its upper atmosphere, the corona, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These are giant eruptions of hot plasma from the corona that take place at the time when the Sun twisted magnetic field 'snaps' and then reconnects. When releasing high-energy particles during a CME hurtle towards Earth, the 'space weather' can damage orbiting satellites and disrupt power grids on Earth.
In February, a relatively weak CME destroyed 40 Starlink communications satellites that SpaceX, an aerospace company in California, had earlier launched. "With an increasing number of satellites in space, there will also be an increasing demand of bettering the weather of the forecast space," said Ding.
Kazachenko says that predicting space weather remains a struggle. Jingye Yan, the chief engineer of DSRT at the National Space Science Center, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, also mentioned by saying that DSRT has a broad scope of visualization, which is around 36 times bigger than the Sun's disk, which will allow the telescope to track the development of CMEs and observe how high-energy particles propagate through space. Yan said that with this information, the team may be able to forecast the weather and when coronal mass ejections will reach Earth.
DSRT's 313 antennas will be permitted to achieve high sensitivity for better space weather forecasting. The extensive array could potentially capture weaker signals from high-energy particles that might be missed by collections observing at the same frequency range — from 150 megahertz to 450 megahertz — with fewer antennas, including Nançay Radioheliograph in France, which has 47 antennas.
The DSRT's observation data will be available to international researchers sooner. And China's National Space Science Center, which oversees DSRT's operation, plans to open the telescope at night for other types of observation, such as pulsar research. China is also building a new optical telescope on the Tibetan Plateau in Sichuan that is expected to be completed in 2026.
