The Most Remarkable Radio Telescopes in the World
6 places in 5 countries ยท updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable radio telescopes in the world are Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (United States), Atacama Large Millimeter Array (Chile) and Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (People's Republic of China). The list covers 6 radio telescopes in 5 countries. The United States has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A radio telescope listens rather than looks, and to hear the faint signals of distant galaxies it must be enormous. That need gives these instruments a striking, almost abstract beauty: a single white dish turning on its mount, a crater filled with a mesh of panels, or dozens of identical antennas scattered across a desert and moving in unison. Few structures make the scale of the universe so tangible.
The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in England, completed in 1957 with a dish 76 metres across, was the largest steerable dish in the world when built. The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array spreads its 27 antennas along a Y-shaped track on the plains of New Mexico, and ALMA places its dishes on the Chajnantor plateau high in the Chilean Andes. China's FAST, completed in 2016, fills a natural karst depression in Guizhou with a reflector 500 metres wide. Australia's Parkes dish helped relay television pictures of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on earth.
The telescopes were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map; the section also opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array | Radio telescope | United States | |
| 2 | Atacama Large Millimeter Array | Radio telescope | Chile | |
| 3 | Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope | Radio telescope | People's Republic of China | |
| 4 | Lovell Telescope | Radio telescope | United Kingdom | โ |
| 5 | Parkes Observatory | Radio telescope | Australia | |
| 6 | Green Bank Telescope | Radio telescope | United States |
01 Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array
United States34.079ยฐ N 107.618ยฐ W
The Modern Polymath ยท CC BY-SA 4.0 Twenty-seven white dish antennas, each 25 metres across, stand in a vast Y shape on the Plains of San Agustin, a high, flat basin in western New Mexico. Together they form the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), one of the most productive radio observatories ever built. Every dish rides on rail tracks, and the array is periodically rearranged: in its most compact configuration the antennas cluster within about a kilometre, while in the widest the arms stretch some 21 km each, giving images as sharp as those of a single dish tens of kilometres wide.
Did you know? Each dish weighs about 209 tonnes, yet the whole array is regularly reshuffled by a lifting locomotive, nicknamed Hein's Trein, that carries antennas along the rail arms.
02 Atacama Large Millimeter Array
Chile23.019ยฐ S 67.753ยฐ W
Iztok Bonฤina/ESO ยท CC BY 4.0 High on the Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Atacama, some 5,000 metres above sea level, sixty-six white dishes stand in a landscape of ochre dust and bare volcanoes. This is the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, ALMA, a single instrument built from many: fifty antennas twelve metres across, plus a tighter cluster of sixteen smaller ones known as the Atacama Compact Array. The site was chosen for what it lacks. At this altitude and in one of the driest places on Earth there is almost no water vapour overhead, and that is what lets faint millimetre and submillimetre radiation from cold gas and dust in space reach the ground.
Did you know? Costing about 1.4 billion US dollars, ALMA is described as the most expensive ground-based telescope in operation.
03 Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope
People's Republic of China25.653ยฐ N 106.857ยฐ E
SCJiang ยท CC BY-SA 4.0 In the karst hills of Pingtang County in Guizhou, southern China, a natural bowl-shaped depression called Dawodang has been lined with the largest single-dish radio telescope ever built. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope โ FAST, known in China as Tianyan, the "Sky Eye" โ is a reflector 500 metres across, made from some 4,450 triangular panels. Rather than tilting, the dish changes shape: thousands of actuators pull the cable net beneath the panels so that, at any moment, an area about 300 metres wide becomes a parabola aimed at the target, while the receiver cabin hangs above on cables and moves to the focus.
Did you know? About 9,000 people living within five kilometres of the dish were relocated to create the radio-quiet zone around the telescope.
More about Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope โ
04 Lovell Telescope
United Kingdom ยท 26.9 km from Manchester53.236ยฐ N 2.307ยฐ W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Mike Peel ; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester ยท CC BY-SA 4.0 Rising above the Cheshire fields near Goostrey, the Lovell Telescope is the great white dish that made Jodrell Bank a household name. Its reflector is 76 metres (250 feet) across, and when it was completed in 1957 it was by a wide margin the largest steerable radio telescope in the world; today it is still the third largest. The instrument was conceived by Bernard Lovell of the University of Manchester, built to the design of the engineer Charles Husband, and known simply as the Mark I until it was renamed in Lovell's honour in 1987.
Did you know? The dish tilts on gear racks salvaged from the 15-inch gun turrets of the battleships HMS Revenge and HMS Royal Sovereign.
05 Parkes Observatory
Australia ยท 17 km from Parkes32.998ยฐ S 148.263ยฐ E
Diceman Stephen West ยท CC BY-SA 3.0 The Parkes radio telescope rises from the open farmland of central New South Wales, a 64-metre dish that tilts and turns to follow the sky. Its surface has a distinctive two-tone look, smooth solid aluminium in the centre and perforated panels towards the rim, and the focus cabin hangs on three struts 27 metres above the bowl. Completed in 1961, it was one of the first large steerable dishes in the world, and in 2020 it received the Wiradjuri name Murriyang, after the home in the stars of the creator spirit Biyaami.
Did you know? Continuous upgrades have made the dish around 10,000 times more sensitive than it was when it was first switched on in 1961.
06 Green Bank Telescope
United States38.433ยฐ N 79.840ยฐ W
NRAO/AUI/NSF ยท CC BY 4.0 The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, known simply as the GBT, is the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world. Its reflecting surface measures 100 by 110 metres, and it can point to almost any part of the sky above the horizon. It stands in a quiet valley in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, inside the National Radio Quiet Zone, a region of about 13,000 square miles created by the federal government in 1958 where radio transmissions are tightly restricted to protect the observatory's receivers.
Did you know? At 148 metres tall the GBT rises about 60 per cent higher than the Statue of Liberty, pedestal included.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented โ the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the largest radio telescope in the world?
- FAST, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou, China, is the largest single-dish radio telescope, with a reflector 500 metres across set in a natural karst hollow.
- What is the largest fully steerable radio telescope?
- The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, with a dish about 100 by 110 metres, is the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world.
- Why do some radio telescopes use many dishes?
- Arrays such as the Very Large Array and ALMA combine the signals of many antennas through interferometry, so that together they achieve the resolution of a single dish as wide as the distance between them.
- What is the most remarkable radio telescope in the world?
- On our list, Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (United States) ranks first, followed by Atacama Large Millimeter Array (Chile) and Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (People's Republic of China).
- How many radio telescopes are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 6 radio telescopes in 5 countries. The United States has the most, with 2.