China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) has detected 156,411 neutral hydrogen sources across nearly half the sky, marking a major breakthrough in radio astronomy. The findings position FAST as the new global reference in hydrogen survey research.

China's growing radio astronomy capacity, led by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), can help scientists tackle some of astronomy's biggest unanswered questions, renowned Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan has said.

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), known as China's "Sky Eye," has completed a key maintenance milestone in southwest China's Guizhou Province. On June 15, engineers finished installing six massive, domestically developed steel cables, fully replacing the core components of its cable-driven suspension system.

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 was conducted by a team from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences。

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.

On May 23, 2025, an latest research achievement by Chinese scientists was published online in the international academic journal “Science”. The research team from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered a rare millisecond pulsar by China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST). It orbits with its companion star in a period of 3.6 hours, and is eclipsed by the companion star for one-sixth of the time (i.e., an eclipse, similar to a solar or lunar eclipse). This discovery is of great significance for the study of stellar evolution theory, compact star accretion physics, and the gravitational wave source of binary mergers .

Fast radio burst (FRB) is a mysterious radio burst that lasts only a few milliseconds, the study of its origin is a hot topic in astrophysics. The research team made observations with FAST reveals the new physics of millisecond radio bursts in the universe. Two research results on FRB detection were published in the international scientific journal Nature in succession. This is the first time that a completely independent achievement based on the data of China's ground-based telescopes were published on this top journal.

Relying on the advantages of FAST's high sampling rate and detection sensitivity, a research team has carried out high-precision observations of radio continuum spectrum variation and polarization for GRS1915+105 for the first time, and discovered a faint radio pulse in the black hole. This achievement is the first international observation of sub second level low-frequency radio quasi periodic oscillations in micro quasars. It reveals the complex dynamic characteristics of black hole jets. It opens a new window for radio observations and theoretical studies of black holes. This achievement was published in the Nature magazine in July 2023.

The research team used the FAST telescope to collect pulsar timing data for 3 years and 5 months and found evidence for nanohertz gravitational waves. A statistical significance of spatial quadrupole correlation at 4.6 sigma level (false alarm rate less than 0.000002) was obtained near the nanohertz. This is the crucial evidence for nanohertz gravitational waves. The Chinese research team and four other international teams reported this result simultaneously. It indicates that we have achieved a significant breakthrough in sync with the international community. This achievement was published in July 2023 on Astronomy and Astrophysics Research and was selected as one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs in 2023 by the Science magazine.