On a chilly day in December 1945, Bernard Lovell, a physicist at the University of Manchester, struck out for the Cheshire countryside to study cosmic rays, the streams of high-energy particles that crisscross the universe. Peering at the signals from his army surplus radar, he made an unexpected discovery: radio reflections from the ionised trails of shooting stars.
The work marked the birth of radio astronomy at Jodrell Bank. A year later, engineers at the site mounted a radar on the base of a searchlight, providing sweeping access to speeding meteors. When Sputnik launched in 1957, they had just completed the Lovell telescope, the largest radio telescope in the world, the only one capable of tracking the Soviet satellite.
With decades of upgrades, Jodrell Bank has remained world-class, at the heart of a seven-telescope network called e-Merlin, the UK’s national radio astronomy capability. But as of Monday, the network, and Jodrell Bank itself, are threatened with closure. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) plans to pull funding in March 2028. All observations will stop unless alternative support can be found.
Radio astronomy is not an obscure endeavour producing esoteric data. It has changed our view of the universe. Armed with the technique, astronomers have spotted spinning neutron stars that emit powerful beams, illuminating space like a lighthouse. They have watched matter swirling around supermassive black holes, and glimpsed the faint afterglow of the big bang.
Astronomers, of course, have other telescopes to peer down, at least metaphorically. But UK researchers working on many of these face hefty cuts too. Last month, the Rubin observatory in Chile embarked on a decade-long project to record the largest cosmic movie ever. The UK’s involvement will drop 20%. The same goes for an observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Work on the Bison solar observation network will fall by 40%. And the country is withdrawing from the Event Horizon Telescope, which captured the first image of a black hole. Astronomers converged on the same words to describe the news: devastating, shocking, disastrous.
Throughout this year, the STFC has said it needs to make £162m in savings by 2030. The crisis follows cost overruns that arose from soaring electricity and staff costs and high foreign exchange rates for international collaborations such as Cern, home to the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva. But figures obtained by Research Professional News suggest the situation may be worse: a combined forecast cost overrun of £684m for the four years of the government’s latest spending review period.
Other fields of physics have not been spared the axe. The Diamond synchrotron and the Isis muon and neutron source, both in Oxfordshire, face cuts but will remain operational. The Clara facility in Cheshire, which tests next-generation particle accelerator technologies, is being mothballed. The operating budget for Boulby mine, the only deep underground science facility in the UK, is being slashed by 40%. There is no funding for the LHCb experiment on the Large Hadron Collider, which could terminate it early, leaving 80% of data uncollected.
With the money it does have, the STFC wants to prioritise specific areas of research. But the best scientists will go wherever the best science can be done. And on this the signs are ominous. A recent survey found that nearly 80% of early-career physicists were considering leaving the UK after the funding crisis. The loss of even a fraction of that would be a blow for UK science and also national growth. The task now is to persuade them to stay.
