China's Fast telescope switches on, beginning mission to hunt for aliens with the biggest piece of kit ever made

Beijing has spent billions on ambitious space projects, which include its space program as well as the 500-meter long telescope

The world’s largest radio telescope has been switched on – and started looking for aliens.

The huge project is just one of China’s huge number of projects in space and science that it hopes to use to take a bigger role on the national stage. Those have also included the country’s growing and military-backed space program.

But it also serves as China’s big hope for perhaps hearing a message from aliens. One success for the project would be hearing the kind of energy signal that would be sent by another civilisation deep in space.

The radio telescope – known as the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or Fast – is placed in a natural basin in the southern Guizhou province. Its completion is the end result of a process that has taken five years and $180 million.

It also involved the displacement of more than 8,000 people from eight villages to make way for the facility, giving it the 3-mile radius of silence that it needs to work. Those villagers are being given cash or new houses to make up for their movement, according to local reports.

At 500-meters across, it is much bigger than the existing record holder – twice as sensitive and 10 times as fast as anything built before. The biggest in the world was previously the 300-meter Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which even at its smaller size has led to research on the stars that has led to a Nobel prize.

Hundreds of astronomers watched the Fast telescope get switched on in the county of Pingtang, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

The telescope will be listening out for gravitational waves, radio emissions from stars and galaxies – and any kind of signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life coming from deep in the universe.

"The ultimate goal of FAST is to discover the laws of the development of the universe," Qian Lei, an associate researcher with the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told state broadcaster CCTV.

"In theory, if there is civilization in outer space, the radio signal it sends will be similar to the signal we can receive when a pulsar (spinning neutron star) is approaching us," Qian said.

And it has already heard some messages, according to CCTV. During testing it heard a signal from a pulsar that was 1,351 light-years from Earth, according to reports.