Word: rayed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Giacconi recalled last week, the problem entailed getting enough X-ray particles to fall on a detector and create an image, like light (in the form of "photons") hitting film in a camera. Giacconi saw that by positioning mirrors at shallow angles to the incoming radiation, astronomers could collect X-rays over a large area and funnel them onto a small detector, allowing for photographs "a millionfold" more detailed than previously possible...
...theory was there; but technology still needed time to catch up. "We realized that the technology would take many years to develop, but it was a great boost knowing that we ultimately knew a way to make X-ray astronomy very sensitive," Giacconi remembers. Before HEAO-2 could become a reality, though, X-ray astronomy would have to make sporadic progress. In 1962, a group headed by Giacconi discovered the first X-ray star; eight years later the same personnel were responsible for the first orbiting X-ray observatory (named "UHURU" after the Bantu word for freedom...
Though important advances resulted from these and other early missions, the results were still comparatively primitive--the best pre-HEAO-2 X-ray photos of the sky show only blurs and blotches. Though many different and powerful X-ray sources had been found-- among them the leftovers from stellar explosions ("supernova remnants"); some unusual galaxies; and quasars, star-like objects that gave off enormous amounts of energy--their precise structure still could not be observed...
HEAO-2, dubbed the "Einstein Observatory" in honor of the physicist who was born a century ago this year, would change all that. With an X-ray telescope a thousand times more sensitive than any previous instruments, Einstein for the first time has been able to take high resolution X-ray photographs and accurately measure the size, shape and structure of X-ray sources as far as the edge of the known Universe--more than 15 billion light-years away...
...November 13 launch approached, a good part of the Center for Astrophysics revved up for the mass influx of raw data that soon would be arriving. All observation plans for and information analysis from HEAO-2's 0.6-meter reflection X-ray telescope are coordinated from CRA. It took a week for the first picture to arrive on the monitors in Room 306-B. That shot was of Cygnus X-1, a radiation source which many astronomers believe is a black hole, a compressed star with gravity so strong that light cannot escape from...