Radio astronomy grew from the pioneering days of radar during the Second World War. Among those pioneers was Bernard Lovell, who returned to Manchester University in 1945 eager to study cosmic rays using an ex-army radar set.

He found a quiet site 20 miles south of Manchester at the university’s botanical station at Jodrell Bank. He soon realised that much larger dishes were needed for detecting radio signals from space and designed a massive steerable dish that could be pointed to any part of the sky.

Building Jodrell Bank observatory was a saga. Costs rose and bureaucrats began to mutter. Those were the days before big science and Jodrell Bank was swallowing up money at a frightening rate. Lovell’s bacon was saved by the launch of Sputnik in 1957.

Jodrell Bank was the only telescope in the world able to track the carrier rocket by radar and Lovell went from villain to hero overnight. For months he was hardly off television or radio.

But satellites were always a side-show. The real purpose of Jodrell Bank, and the very different radio telescopes built by Martin Ryle at Cambridge, was to open a new window on the Universe.

Until then the only part of the spectrum available to astronomers was visible light. But stars emit radiation across a huge wavelength. Today astronomers work in infra-red, in X-rays, in gamma rays and even in gravitational waves. Radio astronomy was the first bridgehead in this new world.

It revealed a menagerie of extraordinary objects hitherto invisible: quasars, pulsars and radio galaxies. Radio astronomers first heard the unearthly echo that is all that remains of the Big Bang, and deduced the existence of dark matter in the Universe from observing the motions of galaxies.

The resolution of any telescope depends on the relation between the size of its collecting surface and the wavelength of the radiation, so even a dish as huge as Jodrell Bank’s lacked the ability to distinguish precisely the shape and separation of radio sources.

The answer was to link several dishes together, and combine their signals in the technique of radio interferometry. This gave Jodrell Bank a new lease of life as the centre of Merlin, the multi-element radio linked interferometer network. Since its launch it has been a world-class astronomical instrument, and the only one based exclusively in Britain.

Merlin has many achievements to its credit, including the detailed study of quasars, the discovery of gravitational lenses, the first direct observation of the expansion of novae and detailed examination of many objects both local and cosmological in distance.

Do any of these discoveries matter? To most people their significance is as remote as the objects they describe. But astronomy is not meant to be useful. It is not a science designed to give us new products or better devices, but to help us to place ourselves in space and time. The understanding of the cosmos begun by the Greek astronomers and carried on by Kepler and Newton has fallen in this generation to astronomers who use radio and X-rays and satellites to deepen our knowledge.

They have found that there are stranger things in the Universe than ever were dreamt of. It is a laboratory where extreme physics impossible on Earth is an everyday affair. To blind ourselves to this is like choosing to shut a door on a magic kingdom of marvellous things.

Of course, radio astronomy will not come to an end if Merlin can no longer be funded. But an era in which Britain played a central role in advancing discovery possibly will.

Astronomical jargon

Radio astronomy Uses radio signals emitted by stars, galaxies and other objects to locate and study them

Gravitational waves Ripples in the fabric of space and time caused by cosmic events – such as the collision of two black holes – that ought to be detectable using a suitable telescope

Quasars Quasi-stellar objects at great distances that emit radio waves

Pulsars Objects that emit pulses of radio energy. Now believed to be dense, rotating neutron stars

Radio galaxies Galaxies that emit radio waves from their central core

Dark matter Material that cannot be seen but must make up the majority of the universe

Gravitational lenses Massive objects in space that bend light, creating images of objects that lie beyond them

Novae Nuclear explosions on the surface of a dwarf star

Radio interferometry A technique in which the signals from two or more radio dishes are combined to produce a more detailed image

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