Abstract
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is a Chinese mega-science project, which produced its first light on 25 September 2016. Within its first year of commissioning, the FAST team managed to demonstrate the drifting, pointing, tracking, and other basic observing modes. On 10 October 2016, the team announced a sample of new pulsars first discovered by Chinese telescope. To better utilize the unparalleled sensitivity and to circumvent the unprecedented complexities of the FAST system, the speaker and his research group proposed a new observing mode, namely, Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey (CRAFTS). The survey aims to collect samples of galaxies, pulsar, galactic interstellar medium, and fast radio bursts (FRBs) simultaneously in drift-scan mode. Such a mode has never been realized on a major telescope. They have a nationally-funded team to carry out such a survey and expect to discover around 1,000 pulsars, 100,000 galaxies, 10 billion voxels, and around 50 FRBs.
About the speaker
Prof Di Li received his PhD in Astrophysics from Cornell University in 2002. He then joined the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as an astronomer, before he moved to the California Institute of Technology to become a National Research Council Fellow in 2005. In 2012, he was appointed the Chief Scientist and Professor of the Radio Astronomy Division in the National Astronomical Observatories of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Prof Li’s research focuses on interstellar medium, star formation, radio instrumentation and pulsar search. He pioneered several observing and data analysis techniques, including HI narrow self-absorption technique and a new inversion solution to the dust temperature distribution. These techniques facilitate important measurements of star forming regions, such as the formation time scale.
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