Editor's note: In the run-up to the 19th Communist Party of China National Congress, China Daily will cover a series of key projects and advanced equipment of national importance, showcasing the country's huge improvement and relentless efforts at innovation. Observatory being built in Sichuan to discover what makes gamma rays tick

Construction has begun on one of the world's largest and most sensitive cosmic-ray facilities. Located about 4410 m above sea level in the Haizi Mountain in Sichuan Province in southwest China, the 1.2 billion yuan ($180m) Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) will attempt to understand the origins of high-energy cosmic rays. LHAASO is set to open in 2020. Cosmic rays are particl...

The National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planning body, approved the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) project on December 31, 2015. The LHAASO project is designed to explore physics goals in gamma ray astronomy and cosmic ray physics.

China's Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO)—one of the country's key national science and technology infrastructure facilities—has found a dozen ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic accelerators within the Milky Way. It has also detected photons with energies exceeding 1 peta-electron-volt (quadrillion electron-volts or PeV), including one at 1.4 PeV. The latter is the highest energ...