Australian technology is going to be at the heart of the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, to be commissioned this year in China.

The Five-hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, will dwarf the current largest dish, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

FAST's 19-beam receiver is being designed and built in Australia by CSIRO engineers working at the organisation's Astronomy and Space Science unit in Marsfield.

Large radio telescopes are able to look deep into the past of the universe with great sensitivity. Not only will observations at the FAST observatory help us to better understand exotic astronomical phenomena such as pulsars and black holes, but they will also let us peer into the nursery of early galaxy formation in the cosmic web of hydrogen gas that existed before galaxies formed.