We were heading along South Road after an enthusiastic formal, with my scientist boyfriend trailing somewhat unsteadily behind. So when he started spinning around with his head upwards, mumbling about all the ‘pretty lights in sky’, there were a fair few jokes at his expense before we humoured him by paying attention to where he was pointing. Sure enough, the night sky did appear a bit odd – there were a few faint slashes of green and pink. Street lights? Or maybe sunset through a layer of pollution? My boyfriend was adamant that we were seeing the mysterious Northern Lights – usually associated with much higher latitudes.

The Northern Lights (or Aurora Borealis) are eerily beautiful ribbon or curtain-like patterns of light in our atmosphere, made of glowing atoms lit up as a result of collisions between particles from the Sun and the Earth’s magnetic field. When the Sun is particularly restless, it can splurge out billions of tonnes of plasma towards the Earth – on these occasions, we have a good chance of seeing the Aurora right across the UK. A ground-based solar astronomy group from Lancaster, who were studying the magnetic activity of our atmosphere, had the idea of setting up an automatic email service, AuroraWatch, to let members of the public know when there was a particularly good chance of being able to see the Aurora. Like tens of thousands of others, my boyfriend had signed up to it. So off we trooped back to Trevs and sure enough, there was an email waiting. Soon, there was a whole crowd outside college, swelled by groups distracted on their way to Klute and pointing out each new bit of the Aurora as it appeared. The lights were a haunting and magical sight, and one that I am stunned to have seen in Durham.

So, you’re probably expecting me to now urge you all to sign up to the AuroraWatch mailing list. Well, there’d be no point. The Sun at the moment is near the minimum of its 11 year cycle of activity, so it’s unlikely that the Aurora will be bright enough to be visible in Durham any time soon. Instead, this article is a lament that when the Sun does start to wake up again, there’ll be no AuroraWatch around to let members of the public know about it. It’s a tiny casualty of the new budget for Particle Physics and Astronomy, which the government announced just before Christmas. It is very clear that it’ll affect Physics Departments across the country by shrinking the number of students and researchers – precise figures have not yet been released, so it is not yet possible to say how many jobs in Durham will go. Furthermore, Keith Mason (the guy in charge of the government research council STFC) announced that they’d made what he called "two and a half decisions". Getting rid of UK ground-based solar studies only accounted for the ‘half’ decision as it was already a bit out of favour.

In no particular order, Decision No. 1 was to pull the UK out of the future great particle physics experiment, the International Linear Collider. The current big particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is going to be switched on this year, creating conditions that haven’t been prevalent in the universe since just after the Big Bang, long before it even became transparent. Projects like the LHC need huge international collaborations and take decades to plan and build. Work on the successor – the International Linear Collider – had already started and the UK particle physics community were heavily involved. Jamie Tattersall, a PhD student at Durham told us, "Two years of my research have been spent working on the ILC. I was distraught that Britain has now decided to pull out of this important international project – this is a view echoed throughout the whole particle physics community."

Decision No. 2 resulted in the UK losing all access to the two Gemini telescopes. While the UK has access to another large telescope in the South, the loss of the Northern Gemini telescope has hit the UK astronomy community hard. One of the main Gemini users in Durham, Dr. Mark Swinbank told us "It’s a disaster really. Gemini North is the only 8m telescope in the Northern hemisphere that the UK has access to – you’ve cut off half the sky." The loss is especially acute because UK astronomers have put a lot of work into surveys of the Northern skies, valuable tools which they were planning to use in their latest investigations. UK astronomers had intended to use the Gemini telescopes to help answer some of the most pressing questions in astronomy, such as how the first galaxies formed, what are the properties of our neighbouring galaxies, how many planets exist outside our solar system and what these extrasolar planets are like.

Unquestionably, both Particle Physics and Astronomy in this country have suffered a shattering blow in the last few months, possibly without the government realising it. The Innovation, Universities and Skills Committee have been set the task of looking into this problem and one of its members, our MP Roberta Blackman-Woods, visited the Physics department on Monday 11th February to discuss the situation. The Government has a limited budget for science. While you could argue for weeks about the benefit of ‘blue skies’ research – to other sciences, technology, the knowledge base and the economy – it has to compete against sciences with a more tangible and immediate impact on society. However, unless we work hard to get this balance between pure and applied science right, we should be prepared for the fact that we could miss some of the most beautiful and intriguing aspects of the universe.

Like mistaking the Aurora Borealis for street lights.