Woah woah woah, China. Steady on.
While we were all busy worrying about Brexit, celebrating Gay Pride and tearing up for Fourth of July weekend, China has only been putting the finishing touches to the world's biggest alien-hunting telescope.
Maybe they took the new Independence Day movie too seriously.
The hulking dish in Pingtang County, China's southwestern province of Guizhou, is the size of 30 soccer pitches and has 4,450 panels. It dwarfs anything America has.
Zheng Xiaonian, deputy head of the National Astronomical Observation (NAO) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the telescope will be the global leader for the next couple of decades in searching for UFOs.
The project began back in 2011 and has cost around $180million with 300 "builders, experts, science fiction enthusiasts and reporters" witnessing the installation. 9,000 local people were also displaced from their homes to make room for the telescope.
Nan Rendong, the project's chief scientist, said,
As the world's largest single aperture telescope located at an extremely radio-quiet site, its scientific impact on astronomy will be extraordinary and it will certainly revolutionize other areas of the natural sciences.
That's some pretty big chat from Nan. I hope he backs it up by actually finding life out there. Pressure's on, champ.
Citations: China Finished Building Its Alien-Hunting Telescope (Gizmodo)
