Word: x-rays
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...presented our X-ray astronomy experiment in a lucid manner intelligible to the layman. We would like to point out that the Lunar and Planetary Exploration Branch of the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, through its Dr. John Salisbury, supported this program as part of its continuing search for X rays from planetary sources...
Wheeling with Stars. Physicist Riccardo Giacconi, who had planned the experiment along with Herbert Gursky and Frank Paolini of American Science & Engineering, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., waited impatiently for the next X-ray measuring rocket. When that rocket was fired aloft last October, though, its instruments viewed another part of the sky; they did not record what was going on in Scorpio. They did report on two weaker X-ray sources, and their findings suggested that the original, strong X-ray source was probably located far out in space, beyond the reaches of the solar system, wheeling around the earth...
Last June a third rocket carried improved instruments above the atmosphere. Again they showed the X-ray source glowing powerfully in Scorpio. This time the scientists' report was much less guarded. There could be no doubt that something was there, but no one yet knows what...
Even before last June's confirming flight, other astronomers searched for the X-ray source with every possible technique, but they could not identify their target. Theories, however, are plentiful. Some astronomers believe that the X rays come from a very large concentration of stars near the center of the Milky Way galaxy that are otherwise invisible because of obscuring dust. Professor Bruno Rossi, M.I.T.'s cosmic-ray expert, doubts this idea because those stars would have to be producing more than 1,000 times as many X rays...
...high-level argument cannot get much farther until more is known about the X-ray sky. American Science & Engineering is already planning to fire rockets to look for X rays of longer wave length, and it has a contract totaling more than $1,000,000 with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to put improved X-ray instruments on satellites. Other X-ray sources will probably be found, and Professor Rossi for one thinks that X-ray astronomy may eventually prove as important as radio astronomy. It may be that charged particles blown out of the sun knock soft X...