Word: x-rayed
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Back in 1960, when the only known source of X-rays in space was the sun (though astronomers suspected they would find other sources if they had the equipment to look for them), Riccardo Giacconi, then with American Sciences & Engineering and now a professor of Astronomy here, first proposed a method for using telescopes to take detailed X-ray photographs of distant objects...
...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...