Investing for Discovery in Astronomy

TL;DR

Effective astronomy investment requires a balanced approach supporting diverse team sizes and facilities, fostering both reliable discoveries and disruptive innovations through strategic resource allocation and increased observational opportunities.

Contribution

This paper advocates for a diversified investment strategy in astronomy, emphasizing the importance of supporting both large and small teams and facilities to maximize discovery potential.

Findings

Large teams develop existing ideas, small teams enable disruptive discoveries.

Smaller facilities offer high science return per dollar, acting as growth drivers.

Increasing observing opportunities promotes risk-taking and discovery.

Abstract

How should we invest our available resources to best sustain astronomy's track record of discovery, established over the past few decades? Two strong hints come from (1) our history of astronomical discoveries and (2) literature citation patterns that reveal how discovery and development activities in science are strong functions of team size. These argue that progress in astronomy hinges on support for a diversity of research efforts in terms of team size, research tools and platforms, and investment strategies that encourage risk taking. These ideas also encourage us to examine the implications of the trend toward "big team science" and "survey science" in astronomy over the past few decades, and to reconsider the common assumption that progress in astronomy always means "trading up" to bigger apertures and facilities. Instead, the considerations above argue that we need a balanced set of investments in small- to large-scale initiatives and team sizes both large and small. Large teams tend to develop existing ideas, whereas small teams are more likely to fuel the future with disruptive discoveries. While large facilities are the "value" investments that are guaranteed to produce discoveries, smaller facilities are the "growth stocks" that are likely to deliver the biggest science bang per buck, sometimes with outsize returns. One way to foster the risk taking that fuels discovery is to increase observing opportunity, i.e., create more observing nights and facilitate the exploration of science-ready data.