China to Build World's Largest Telescope Array to Study Sun's Coronal Mass Ejections

The world's largest collection of telescopes intended to study the sun is being constructed in China.

The Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT) array will aid researchers in understanding coronal mass ejections. These enormous solar eruptions can take down the internet and interfere with satellite communications worldwide.

China Building Extensive Telescopes For Solar Probes

According to Space.com, China is now constructing the largest collection of telescopes ever gathered for the sole goal of studying the sun to gain a better understanding of coronal mass ejections, which have the potential to cause havoc on Earth and in its atmosphere.

The Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope is located in the province of Sichuan in southwest China (DSRT). According to sources, the giant telescope array will consist of 313 dishes, each measuring 19.7 feet (6 meters) in diameter. It will have a radius of 1.95 miles (3.14 kilometers).

The telescope array's radio-wave photographs of the sun will be used to study large-scale eruptions of charged particles from the sun's upper atmosphere, or corona. These eruptions are known as CMEs, or coronal mass ejections.

According to a South China Morning Post report, the DSRT should be completed by the end of this year.

The project will include the construction of the Chinese Spectral Radioheliograph in Inner Mongolia to monitor solar activity as part of China's Meridian (Phase II) space surveillance program.

CHINA-SCIENCE-TELESCOPE — This photo taken on December 13, 2020, shows workers at the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) conducting maintenance at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) in Pingtang county in Guizhou, southwest China. - The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) -- the only significant instrument of its kind after the collapse of another telescope in Puerto Rico this month -- is about to open its doors for foreign astronomers to use, hoping to attract the world's top scientific talent. NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images

ALSO READ : China Will Launch Its Sun Observatory That Orbits Earth Every 90 Minutes in October, Urges Public to Suggest a Name for the Probe

The radioheliograph, which has 100 spiral dishes and will study the sun over a wider frequency range than the DSRT, will advance Chinese research into solar physics and space weather.

As part of the experiment, 300 sensors will be set up in 31 places around China, each at a particular intersection of longitude and latitude. More than ten Chinese businesses and institutes have supported the National Space Science Center (NSSC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

About Sun's Surface

Interesting Engineering explained that massive plasma eruptions and magnetic fields from the sun's surface, the corona, are known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). They launch waves of highly charged particles into the outer Solar System.

Normally, the Earth's magnetic field shields us from these solar flares. Still, exceptionally intense CMEs have the potential to destroy electrical infrastructure, including satellites and the internet. There is a greater chance of massive CMEs since the sun is currently in the active part of its 11-year solar cycle.

For instance, a solar storm in 1989 caused a nine-hour power outage that affected more than 6 million people in and surrounding Québec. Even the Toronto Stock Exchange was shut down for three hours due to the broken " fault-tolerant " computer.

Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, has cautioned that a comparable outage impacting worldwide internet infrastructure might cost $7.2 billion every day.