Despite its age, continuous upgrades have kept the Lovell telescope at the cutting edge of astronomical research.
It is the third largest steerable radio telescope in the world, and its science was supercharged when it was connected to six other telescopes across central England, to create the e-MERLIN network.
Joined together these UK telescopes can zoom into objects in deep space and see them in incredible detail – with similar resolution to the Hubble space telescope.
The e-Merlin network is being used for research into:
How planets and their parent stars form.
How galaxies evolve, and the role played by supermassive black holes.
The invisible dark matter and dark energy that make up more than 95% of the Universe.
The e-Merlin network is part of a pan-European network of telescopes – without it, images of distant stars and galaxies will be less clear.
Prof Michael Kramer, is executive director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, and a highly respected scientist at the University of Manchester.
He told BBC News that he believed the decision by UKRI to be “scientifically, technologically as well as economically short-sighted”.
But another important role of Jodrell Bank Observatory is training UK astronomers in the science of radio astronomy. Astronomers have claimed that the closure of Lovell and the e-MERLIN network will mean that Britain will fall behind in a field that was pioneered at Jodrell Bank.
“Internationally, people will look at that and will hardly believe it. You’re cutting off the radio astronomy capability in the country,” Prof Kramer said.
The cut comes at a time when other countries are investing in their own national observatories to prepare for, what many astronomers believe will be, the dawn of a golden age in radio astronomy. This is because of the construction of a new super radio telescope in South Africa and Australia called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
