Riccardo Giacconi

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Riccardo Giacconi (2003)

Riccardo Giacconi (born October 6, 1931 in Genoa ; † December 9, 2018 in San Diego , California ) was an Italian-American astrophysicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 for “pioneering work in astrophysics that led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources have led ”, was awarded.

Life

Riccardo Giacconi was the only child of Antonio Giacconi, who ran a small business, and his wife Elsa Canni Giacconi, a math and physics teacher. His parents divorced when he was eight and he grew up with his mother in Milan . After receiving his doctorate in 1954 at the University of Milan , he was employed there as an assistant professor of physics. In 1956 he moved to Indiana University in Bloomington and in 1958 to Princeton University in Princeton . In 1959 he joined the American Science & Engineering Inc. in Cambridge ( Massachusetts ) (AS & E), a company of Bruno Rossi had been established to operate with state funds research and development. He was admitted to the Board of Directors in 1966 and was Vice President from 1969.

In 1973 he moved to the department of high energy astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge as deputy director and was appointed professor of astronomy at Harvard University in Cambridge. In 1981 he moved to the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore ( Maryland ) as director. From 1991 to 1999 he was Professor of Physics and Astronomy in his hometown of Milan, and from 1993 to 1999 General Director of the European Southern Observatory in Garching near Munich . He returned to the United States in 1999 and has since been President of the Associated Universities in Washington, DC and Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Riccardo Giacconi was married to Mirella, whom he knew from school and who worked as a translator at MIT Press , and had two daughters, Guia and Anna.

plant

Giacconi's work was characterized by failures until 1959, so that he started again at AS&E. He himself described the first years at AS&E as the most productive of his life. From 1959 to 1962 he was involved in the development of the payload of 23 research rockets, 6 satellite missions and an aircraft mission, as well as in the development of a complete satellite.

On June 12, 1962, an Aerobee high-altitude research rocket with an X-ray detector as a payload was launched for the first time . The stated goal, an X-ray of the moon , could not be achieved - today we know that the signal was too weak for the instruments of the time, so that an "X-ray photo" of the moon was only possible in 1990 with ROSAT - but instead a bright object became found in the constellation Scorpio, Scorpius X-1 . Another Giacconi project was the Uhuru X-ray satellite , which was launched in 1970 and with which a complete X-ray survey of the sky was carried out for the first time. 339 objects were found in the energy range from 2 to 6 keV. The next satellite project was the Einstein Observatory , which was launched on November 12, 1978.

From 1981 to 1993 Giacconi was the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, responsible for the development and construction of the Hubble space telescope .

Giacconi was not involved in the planning phase of the next X-ray satellite, ROSAT, but he made a significant contribution to the acquisition of American contributions to this project (including a free start). This contribution was very important because the BMFT made substantial international participation a condition for funding such a project in the late 1970s.

Riccardo Giacconi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 for his achievements in X-ray astronomy, especially for the discovery of Scorpius X-1 , the other half of the prize was shared by Masatoshi Koshiba and Raymond Davis Jr.

Awards and memberships

literature

Web links

Commons : Riccardo Giacconi  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member History: Riccardo Giacconi. American Philosophical Society, accessed August 18, 2018 (with a short biography).
personal data
SURNAME Giacconi, Riccardo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian-American astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Genoa
DATE OF DEATH December 9, 2018
Place of death San Diego , California