China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) has detected 156,411 neutral hydrogen sources across nearly half the sky, marking a major breakthrough in radio astronomy and the world's largest sample of its kind.

The findings, published as a cover story in the journal Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, position FAST as the new global reference in hydrogen survey research.

The 156,411 galactic "identity cards" are expected to advance multiple frontier fields, including galaxy formation and evolution, dark matter distribution and large-scale cosmic structures, said Zhang Chuanpeng, lead author of the study and associate researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.