LONDON (AP) — Scientists have reacted with alarm to news that the British government will cut funding to the world-famous radio telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northwest England that has been helping explore the cosmos for almost 70 years. Government funding body U.K. Research and Innovation announced Monday that it will no longer fund the Lovell telescope, whose 250-foot-wide (76-meter-wide) parabolic reflecting bowl is a local landmark. It’s part of a network of seven radio telescopes across the country known as e-Merlin connected to the Jodrell Bank astrophysics center south of Manchester. “For the sake of U.K. physics and our national reputation as a place to do science, conduct research and innovate, we would urge the new government to review this ruinous set of decisions,” he said. Completed in 1957, the Lovell telescope has played a major role in the history of radio astronomy, which studies distant space objects through the radio waves they emit.