Relocated residents would вЂњenjoy better living standardsвЂќ, the official Xinhua news agency said when the dish was completed in July. It could catalogue as many pulsars in a year as had been found in the past 50, Peng said.Д«ut he acknowledged that FAST will be overtaken by the larger Square Kilometre Array telescope in South Africa and Australia, which will be built over the next decade.ДЇAST needs a five kilometre-wide (three miles) вЂњradio silenceвЂќ buffer zone around it with electronics banned in order to reduce interference with the sky's much fainter frequencies. The world's most populous country and second-largest economy has so far only won one scientific Nobel, awarded last year to chemist Tu Youyou for medicine.ДЇAST's receivers are more sensitive than any previous radio telescope, and its pioneering technology can change the shape of the dish to track celestial objects as the Earth rotates. We as Chinese people really want to win them.вЂќ вЂњI think we can get a few Nobel prizes out of it.

вЂњWe said we had to be a little more daring, because we had to surpass the US no matter what,вЂќ Peng said. The 500-metre-wide (1,640 feet) dish dwarfs its nearest competitor, the US's Puerto Rico-based Arecibo telescope, which is 305 metres across. Octogenarian Han Jingfu drank pesticide days after being made to sign a relocation contract and died at his front door, neighbours and relatives said.Д¬hina built FAST as part of efforts to take on international rivals and raise its embarrassingly low tally of Nobel Prizes, explained Peng Bo, director of China's National Astronomical Observatories, which oversees the telescope. Many were outraged at being forced to leave the valley surrounded by forested karst hills and hundreds of families are now suing the government, with some cases being heard this week. Once fully operational, FAST will be able to peer deeper into space than ever before, examining pulsars, dark matter and gravitational waves - and searching for signs of life.ДЄuthorities also hope it will bring tourist dollars to the province of Guizhou, one of ChinaвЂ™s poorest regions.Д«ut it comes at the cost of forcibly displacing about 9,000 villagers who called the site in Pingtang county their home.

The five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in the country's southwest, which was launched in September and cost 1.2 billion yuan (US$180 million) to build, is the worldвЂ™s largest radio telescope. The five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope in the China's southwest, which cost 1.2 billion yuan ($180 million) to build, is the worldвЂ™s largest radio telescope

National radio silence zone