(Yicai Global) May 29 -- Alibaba Group Holding, China's second-biggest online retailer, has teamed up with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to provide computing and storage solutions for the country's pulsar-detecting 500-meter aperture spherical radio telescope, also known as the Sky Eye or FAST.

National Astronomical Observatories has collected vast amounts of data since the telescope entered operation in 2016, and Alibaba Cloud Computing will use its high-performance computing power to guarantee the quality and integrity of that information, tech portal Zhongguancun Online reported.

The Sky Eye is the world's largest single-aperture spherical radio telescope and can theoretically receive waves from up to 13.7 billion light years away (the observable universe has an estimated radius of around 46 billion light years, the distance from Earth to the Sun is approximately 8.3 light minutes). In the roughly 20 months it has been in operation, FAST has discovered 51 pulsar candidates, of which 11 have been identified as new pulsars.

Pulsars are a type of neutron star, a city-sized celestial body formed from the remains of a supernova and made up of the densest matter known to mankind, excluding black holes. They are useful to scientists in a number of ways, such as testing Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity in stronger gravitational fields, discovering planets outside the Earth's solar system and detecting gravitational waves, which can further enhance human knowledge of the universe.

Alibaba Cloud Computing and the NAO first teamed up back in 2016 to set up the Astronomical Big Data Joint Research Center and create a virtual observatory to share views of a billion celestial bodies via the cloud.

Editor: James Boynton