Tom Bolton is a long-time professor of astronomy and astrophysics, who has explored the heavens using Canada’s largest telescope since 1971. He is the first astronomer to present irrefutable evidence of the existence of a black hole. On July 2nd, the University of Toronto sent him an e-mail giving him 10 days to get off the premises. In November, the university voted to close the observatory and sell it to the highest bidder, and redirect the money from the sale back into the school’s astronomy program. Yesterday it confirmed it has a “firm agreement” with a buyer and it’s looking to close the deal by month-end. It did not disclose the buyer or the price.
On Wednesday, the University of Toronto laid off staff at the observatory, including telescope operators Heide DeBond and Toomas Karmo. Mr. Karmo arrived at work to find the following letter in his slot: “The department is not longer in need of your services. There will be no further observations, but you will be paid the hours you would have worked tonight as telescope operator.”
The observatory, which opened in 1935, is a white-domed structure beside an art deco building that looks much like a stone castle, nestled on a hill in 79 hectares of forest. In the 1930s, Jessie Donalda Dunlap donated the site and bought the school a 74-inch telescope, made in England, to honour her late husband, David, an amateur astronomer. Her bequest states that if the lands cease to be used for an observatory, the property reverts to her heirs.
Selling the property and putting the money into a new astronomical research institute, the U of T’s Mr. Steiner said, is a better way to honour the donor’s intent to further world-class astronomical research. But Prof. Bolton strongly disagrees. “If [the university] had talked to me, I would have told them how we could be doing world-class research,” he said. With a modest investment, the university could have returned the observatory to the “showcase” status it had 20 years ago, before “they started running it into the ground by systematically starving us for replacement faculty.”
Light pollution, he said, is not impeding the observatory’s work. Not only did he persuade Richmond Hill to pass a light pollution bylaw in 1995, but he said the observatory specializes on research on stars that are “considerably brighter than the limits of the telescope.”
– from network.nationalpost.com