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Can a giant radio telescope map hidden gas in nearby galaxies?
Chen Xu, Yingjie Jing, Jie Wang, Hu Zou, Wei Du, Niankun Yu, Hong Guo, Zerui Liu, Qingze Chen, Tiantian Liang, Zhipeng Hou, Yiwei Xu, Xiao Li, Hui-Jie Hu, Ziming Liu, Pinsong Zhao, Taotao Fang, Liang Gao, Qi Guo, Qiusheng Gu, Zhen Jiang, Xi Kang, Xu Kong, Cheng Li, Jun Pan, Tao Wang, Yanrui Zhou, Wenting Wang, Jing Wang
May 22, 2026
China's FAST telescope surveyed 10 square degrees of sky and found 339 nearby galaxies rich in neutral hydrogen, a 6× improvement over existing wide-field surveys. Using DESI optical redshifts, researchers matched 90% of detections and found that half of surveyed galaxies contain detectable cold gas. The results validate a planned full survey to map gas across diverse galaxy types and test how gas content scales with stellar mass and star formation.
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