Amid simmering anxiety about the
future of federally funded science, the U.S. government has quietly withdrawn support for cosmology’s next premier project, an experiment that would have given us the best read yet of the strangest chapter in our cosmic origin story.
Called
CMB-S4—or Cosmic Microwave Background Stage 4—the project would have used a suite of new radio telescopes, constructed in Antarctica and Chile, to search the big bang’s faint, ancient afterglow for new clues about
the universe’s earliest moments. First conceived in 2013 and repeatedly ranked as a top priority by the nation’s astronomers and physicists, the project carried an estimated $900-million price tag, which was set to be roughly split between U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Yet in a terse, unsigned statement to project leaders on July 10, the two agencies declared they had “jointly decided that they can no longer support the CMB-S4 project.”
“We knew things weren’t looking good,” says
John Carlstrom of the University of Chicago, the project’s principal investigator. “They had warned us that it was not the time to start any big projects, given all the budget areas and all the uncertainty. But whether they would continue to drag us out or have a clean break or try to do something—that was unknown.”
Without federal support, Carlstrom says, the project is essentially canceled. . . . .
