- John Gatenby Bolton
"This article is on the astronomer John Bolton. For other people named "John Bolton," see
John Bolton (disambiguation) ."John Gatenby Bolton (
June 5 1922 –July 6 1993 ) was a British-Australianastronomer fromSheffield , England. He attendedKing Edward VII School (Sheffield) , followed byTrinity College, Cambridge from 1940 to 1942, during which time he metC. 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 theCSIRO Division of Radiophysics. At that time the field ofradio astronomy was quite new and Bolton took the opportunity to become a pioneer in the field with experimentation atDover Heights . His group found a number of radio sources in the sky, and realized that certain "radio stars" were actually located outside ourgalaxy and worked on mapping the structure of our galaxy.He held a fellowship at
Caltech beginning in 1955. In 1956, he resigned his position at CSIRO to become Professor of Radio Astronomy at Caltech, but he returned to Australia just a few years later to help build theParkes radio telescope . This telescope found some distant radio sources now known to bequasar s. It also helped transmit the video of the first Moon landing byNeil Armstrong .He won the
Henry Norris Russell Lectureship in 1968, theGold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1977 and theBruce Medal in 1988External links
* [http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/BruceMedalists/Bolton/index.html Bruce Medal page]
* [http://www.science.org.au/academy/memoirs/bolton.htm Biographical memoir] from theAustralian Academy of Science Obituaries
* [http://adsabs.harvard.edu//full/seri/JApA./0014//0000115.000.html JApA 14 (1993) 115]
* [http://adsabs.harvard.edu//full/seri/PASAu/0011//0000086.000.html PASAu 11 (1994) 86]
* [http://adsabs.harvard.edu//full/seri/PASP./0108//0000729.000.html PASP 108 (1996) 729]
* [http://adsabs.harvard.edu//full/seri/QJRAS/0035//0000225.000.html QJRAS 35 (1994) 225]
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