Funding Cuts Leave Jodrell Bank Telescope Facing Closure

UKRI, which has an annual budget of nearly £10 billion, said it had to concentrate investment on projects delivering "the greatest long-term impact"; its Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is making substantial savings after electricity bills and staff costs soared. Jodrell Bank's annual grant was £2.8 million. The site, established in 1945, pioneered radio astronomy and has since been used to study how stars and planets form, the part supermassive black holes play in how galaxies evolve, and the dark matter and dark energy that fill most of the universe. It also tracked Soviet missiles during the Cold War and won UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage status in 2019. Its Lovell telescope, the world's third-largest steerable dish, is linked to six others across central England, producing images of deep space with a sharpness comparable to the Hubble Space Telescope's.

Professor Brian Cox, of the University of Manchester, which hosts the observatory, called the cuts "hasty and ill-considered", and Professor Catherine Heymans, Scotland's Astronomer Royal, described them as "a real act of national self-harm". Professor Michael Kramer, of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, warned that Britain would be cutting off its own radio astronomy capability; the BBC notes that without e-Merlin the wider European network's images will be less clear. The observatory intends to challenge the decision, and hopes work tracking satellites and space debris could attract alternative money. The Guardian reports that the wider cuts hit dozens of facilities and could cost around 800 jobs. The timing is awkward: as the BBC notes, South Africa and Australia are building a new radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which many astronomers expect to open a golden age in radio astronomy.