FAST is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope. Its main scientific fields include conducting large sky neutral hydrogen survey, observing pulsars, detecting interstellar molecules, and searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Its unparalleled sensitivity and excellent survey speed will help astronomers further explore the universe.

Chinese astronomers have unveiled the mysterious origins of a young pulsar located in the Milky Way's halo, providing compelling observational evidence for the study of such objects' formation. The study, conducted by a team from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory (XAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was recently published in the Astrophysical Journal.

A research team led by Prof. WANG Na from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has conducted in-depth observations of the millisecond pulsar PSR J0435+3233 using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). The team found that PSR J0435+3233 has a high spin-down rate—two orders of magnitude greater than that of any other known millisecond pulsar in the Milky Way.

Through studying the observation data of China's gigantic radio telescope located in the country's southwestern Guizhou Province, an international research team has uncovered compelling new evidence supporting a binary-system origin for at least some fast radio bursts (FRBs), one of the most enigmatic phenomena in modern astrophysics.