UK Joins ESO

After dragging its feet for years, the UK is joining the European Southern Observatory in July. The move will give the country’s astronomers access to the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and ESO’s other facilities in Chile (see Physics Today, September 2000, page 55 ). The UK will be ESO’s 10th member state.

Joining ESO also assures UK astronomers a role in planning the 100-meter Overwhelmingly Large Telescope and other future projects that are too costly for the country to afford alone.

“This is fantastic news for Britain. It’s like Christmas,” says Richard Ellis, a former director of the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy who is now at Caltech. British astronomy had slipped since its peak in the 1970s and 1980s, when it commanded about 15% of the world’s 4-meter telescopes. The UK currently has the equivalent of half an 8-meter telescope—one-quarter shares in each of the Gemini twins—or about 3% of existing and planned 8-meter telescopes, says UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge. Joining ESO, he adds, “restores the UK’s full competitiveness with the countries of mainland Europe. Moreover, ESO, with UK participation, can quite reasonably aspire to forge ahead of the US in ground-based astronomy. So this development is not only good for the UK, but good for European science as well.”

But it won’t be pain free: Cuts of some £5 million ($7.2 million) a year in existing programs are the government’s condition for paying £10 million toward the £12 million annual ESO dues. So the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), the UK funding agency responsible for astronomy, is chopping the country’s share in, and the total running budget of, the Anglo–Australian Observatory in New South Wales—the facility it chose over ESO for Southern Hemisphere stargazing 40 years ago. The UK will also withdraw from several telescopes on the Spanish island of La Palma and in Hawaii, or, as with the 4.2-meter William Herschel Telescope, reduce the number of instruments. The University of Manchester’s MERLIN, a radio array centered on Jodrell Bank, was spared, and in fact will be upgraded. PPARC head Ian Halliday says that the UK’s membership in Gemini is not threatened, though “it’s clear that downstream our astronomers will be asking to fund instruments on both Gemini and the VLT, so there will be a competitive element. That’s life.”

In addition to annual dues, the UK has to pay an entry fee of DM 240 million ($110 million) to join ESO. Half of that will be in the form of VISTA, a new infrared survey telescope. The rest will be paid over the next decade and will be used to cement ESO’s membership in the Atacama Large Millimeter Array. And that, says Halliday, made the UK’s signing on particularly attractive to ESO. “The timing was crucial.”