John Gatenby Bolton

Who was John Gatenby Bolton?

John Gatenby Bolton FRS was a British-Australian astronomer from Sheffield, England. He attended King Edward VII School, followed by Trinity College, Cambridge from 1940 to 1942, during which time he met C. P. Snow. After graduation he joined the navy, serving on HMS Unicorn during World War II. His ship went to Australia; he remained there after the war. In September 1946 he began working at the CSIRO Division of Radiophysics. At that time the field of radio astronomy was quite new and Bolton took the opportunity to become a pioneer in the field with experimentation at Dover Heights. His group found a number of radio sources in the sky, and realized that certain "radio stars" were actually located outside our galaxy and worked on mapping the structure of our galaxy.

In 1948 Bolton’s team identified the first known radio galaxies, or "radio stars," external galaxies that can be traced by the strong signals they emit at radio wavelengths. He established the Owens Valley Radio Observatory during a six-year stint teaching physics and astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, but in 1961 he returned to Australia to oversee construction of the Parkes dish.