Enrico Costa (astrophysicist)

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Enrico Costa (* 1944 in Sassari , Sardinia ) is an Italian astrophysicist , known for his studies on Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB).

Life

Costa grew up in Rome in 1954 and studied physics there. For his doctorate with Giulio Auriemma , he participated in rocket experiments with X-ray detectors at the IAS (Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale) in Rome. From 1976 he joined the IAS and initially carried out balloon experiments. Later he was involved in BeppoSAX , the Italian X-ray astronomy satellite (with Dutch participation and ESA support), which operated from 1996 to 2003. In 1981, Costa was part of Livio Scarsi's team that proposed the construction of the satellite. A Phoswich Detector System (PDS) from Filippo Frontera was used on the satellite to detect Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB) (Gamma Ray Burst Monitor, GRBM).

On February 28, 1997, after localization by SAX, the X-ray afterglow of a GRB could be observed for the first time , followed a little later by optical afterglow (William Herschel and Isaac Newton telescopes, La Palma ). Two months later it was possible to determine the redshift of another GRB with subsequent observation in the radio range and thus it was possible to directly demonstrate that the GRB are of extragalactic origin.

In 1999 he contributed the X-ray detector for the Italian X-ray / gamma-ray satellite AGILE , which was launched in 2007. He also developed X-ray polarimeters .

In 2011 he and Gerald Fishman received the Shaw Prize for their research on Gamma Ray Bursts. In 2010 he received the Premio Enrico Fermi with Frontera .

His wife Alda works with him as an electronics expert. The couple has two children.

literature

  • Govert Schilling: Flash! The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the Universe . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, ISBN 0-521-80053-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ for phosphor sandwich. Description at Saint Gobain Crystals ( Memento of the original from January 4, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.detectors.saint-gobain.com
  2. ↑ reporting GRB 970228 to the IAU Costa u. a. . Costa, Frontera et al. a. Discovery of an X-ray afterglow associated with the γ-ray burst of February 28, 1997 , Nature, Volume 387, 1997, pp. 783-785, Arxiv
  3. ^ Daniel Reichert: The Redshift of GRB 970580 . In: Astrophysical Journal / 2 = Letters , Volume 495 (1997), pp. L99-L101, ISSN  2041-8205 .
personal data
SURNAME Costa, Enrico
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Sassari