The observatory, which is the largest in the world, consists of 313 drops of 6 metres wide each, making with each other a diameter greater than 3 kilometers. The dishes are designed to resemble a sunflower, where the sun follows an hour.
The Chinese government has recently completed the seizure of DSRT solar radio observatory devices, and scientists will begin official work on it by June 2023, which will contribute to the development of researchers' knowledge of space weather.
The observatory is located on the edge of the Qinghai Plateau in Tibet, a completely remote area more than 3,800 metres above sea level, and helps to protect the observatory from weather disturbances, thereby ensuring as clear a sky as possible, allowing the observatory to capture weak solar signals.
The observatory, the world's largest - consists of 313 drops of 6 metres wide each, making a circle larger than 3 kilometres in diameter, and the dishes are designed to resemble a sunflower, where the sun follows an hour.
Essentially, the observatory is interested in studying solar explosions and how they affect the Earth, in the 150-450 MHz frequency range that achieves high-resolution solar event imaging
What solar explosions?
Solar flares are a natural phenomenon that occasionally occurs on the surface of the Sun, caused by the nature of the Sun's material. They consist of hot plasma at very high temperatures.
The solar explosion is like squeezing a spring very hard and then suddenly leaving it, because these huge rings of plasma trap a great deal of energy inside, and then suddenly release it into space, marching to Earth and other planets in the form of high solar winds.
Solar wind is usually without impact on Earth, but in the case of powerful solar explosions it may radically affect navigation systems and satellites, turn them off or off for good, and the same may happen with ground power plants.
With the high frequency of space travel and the use of satellites in everything, from communications to locating you using software such as Google Maps, studying sun physics can achieve a better understanding of those phenomena for scientists, and possibly fully prevent them in the future.
It seems that we are already entering the golden age of sun physics, where the U.S. Space and Aviation Agency (NASA) had launched the Parker Solar Probe in 2018, and the European Space Agency launched its Solar Orbiter in 2020, both studying several solar phenomena.
China kicks off
The Daucheng Solar Radio Observatory is part of a promising project of China called Meridian, launched in 2008, consisting of a network of several Earth stations designed to monitor space weather.
At the same time, China has intensified its efforts to study the physics of the Sun over the past few years, launching the satellite "Xihe" in October 2021 to understand the characteristics of solar explosions, and in October this year launched the solar observatory "Kwafu 1" (Kuafu-1) aimed at studying the magnetic field of the Sun along with several other solar phenomena.
It does not stand at the limits of the Sun, this is not the first time China has led with the largest telescope of its kind, starting work on its world's largest 500 metre radio telescope, FAST, in 2016.
From above, Fast appears to be a huge dish on the inside, and the telescope aims to study beyond the Sun, where scientists use it to determine the characteristics of dark matter and count the pulsars in the galaxy, nearly 2,000 of which have been discovered so far, which, according to theoretical calculations, represent only 3% of the total number of stars of this type.
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