John Gatenby Bolton

John Gatenby Bolton ( born June 5, 1922 in Sheffield, † July 6, 1993 ) was a British- Australian astronomer and pioneer of radio astronomy. He succeeded the first identification of cosmic radio sources with known objects.

Bolton attended Trinity College, Cambridge from 1940 until 1942. After graduation, he served in World War II in the British navy, and thus came to Australia. After the war, he remained there and began working for the Department of Radio Physics of CSIRO in September 1946. He was one of the pioneers of the then new radio astronomy, his team discovered by a former radar station on the Australian coast some of the first radio sources in the sky which were partially identified with other galaxies, such as Centaurus A (NGC5128) and Virgo A ( M87 ).

From 1955 he had a position at the California Institute of Technology where he established as the Director of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory from 1956. In 1961 he returned to Australia to oversee the construction of the Parkes Observatory, he was its first director. With the local radio telescope many distant radio galaxies and quasars were discovered, it was also used for the television broadcast of the first lunar landing.

Honors

Galaxy Messier 87 Radio galaxy Astrophysics Data System
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