China will open its Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) to the international scientific community starting from April.

Initially, around 10 percent of the telescope's observation time will be allocated to global research from April and the allocation will be based on the scoring of the project review, which is expected to draw fierce application from the international community, a person in charge of the project said.

"Scientists from around the world can submit their research proposals to use the FAST, and observation periods will be distributed after a special council evaluates various research projects," Sun Chun, from the FAST facility was quoted by chinanews.com.

Located in Pingtang country, southwest China's Guizhou Province, FAST is believed to be the world's most sensitive radio telescope.

It took 26 years for FAST to complete pre-research, with nearly 100 scientific researchers have been involved in this project.

With the assistance of the FAST, scientists have made a series of breakthroughs, including discovering 300 pulsars and publishing 40 papers have based on the FAST data. 

Among them a discovery of a new fast radio burst (FRB) has been selected as the top 10 scientific discoveries by Nature in 2020.