The largest radio telescope in the world officially opened Sunday, according to China's official Xinhua News. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, is named after its diameter, which, at 500 meters, is 195 meters wider than the second-largest telescope of its kind, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Xinhua reported the telescope cost $180 million and 8,000 people were displaced from their homes to create the necessary three-mile radius of radio silence around the facility. It will be used for "observation of pulsars as well as exploration of interstellar molecules and interstellar communication signals." Researcher Qian Lei