FAST fringe

2021-02-09

On January 24, 2019, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) obtained its first VLBI interference fringe (Figure 1) together with the Tianma 65-meter telescope.

The FAST team from NAOC cooperated with the VLBI team from SHAO in this joint observation. The compact source 3C454.3 was observed with these two large radio telescopes, and the fringe was found by the DiFX correlator in SHAO. In the process of FAST commissioning, this VLBI fringe indicates the possibility of FAST joining the VLBI networks in the future.

FAST is the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, while Tianma telescope is the largest fully steerable single-dish radio telescope in China. This successful joint observation is the start of the good prospects of cooperation in the future, which are helpful to improve the sensitivity of Chinese VLBI Network (CVN) in L band to the state of art performance, and beneficial to conduct radio observations with both high sensitivity and high resolution.