Riccardo Giacconi

Riccardo Giacconi ( born October 6, 1931 in Genoa) is an Italian- American astrophysicist who was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics " for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources ".

Life

Riccardo Giacconi, was born on October 6, 1931 as the only child of Antonio Giacconi, who led a small business, and his wife Elsa Canni Giacconi, a mathematics and physics high school teacher. His parents were divorced when he was eight years old and he grew up with his mother in Milan. After receiving his doctorate in 1954 at the University of Milan, where he received an appointment as assistant professor of physics. In 1956 he moved to the University of Indiana in Bloomington and 1958 at Princeton University in Princeton. In 1959, he joined the American Science & Engineering Inc. in Cambridge (Massachusetts ) ( AS & E), a company that had been founded by Bruno Rossi to operate with government funds research and development. He was inducted in 1966 in the Board and in 1969 was Vice President.

In 1973 he became deputy director of the Department of High Energy Astrophysics of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, and was appointed professor of astronomy at Harvard University in Cambridge. In 1981, he joined as director of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (Maryland). From 1991 to 1999 he was professor of physics and astronomy in his hometown of Milan, 1993-1999 Director General of the European Southern Observatory in Garching near Munich. In 1999 he went back to the United States and has since been president of Associated Universities in Washington, DC and research professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Riccardo Giacconi is married to Mirella, which he already knows from school and who worked as a translator at MIT press, and has two daughters, Guia and Anna.

Work

The work of Giacconi was marked to 1959 of failures, so that he made ​​a fresh effort at AS & E. He described the first years at AS & E as the most productive of his life, he was from 1959 to 1962 involved in the development of the payload of 23 rockets, six satellite missions and aircraft mission and the development of a complete satellite.

On June 12, 1962 Aerobee - sounding rocket was launched with an X-ray detector as a payload for the first time. The stated goal of an x-ray of the moon, although could not be reached - today we know that the signal for the former instruments was too weak, so that a " X-ray photo " of the moon in 1990 with ROSAT succeeded - but instead was a bright object found in the constellation Scorpio, Scorpius X -1. Another project Giacconis was the X-ray satellite Uhuru, which was launched in 1970 and with a full -sky survey was performed for the first time in X-rays, in the energy range 2-6 keV 339 objects were found. The next satellite project was the Einstein Observatory, which was launched on 12 November 1978.

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

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

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

Awards

Bloomington (Indiana) Princeton (New Jersey) Cambridge (Massachusetts) Raymond Davis, Jr. Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy Astronomische Gesellschaft Hendrik Lorentz Pieter Zeeman Pierre Curie Gabriel Lippmann Karl Ferdinand Braun Guglielmo Marconi Wilhelm Wien Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Johannes Stark Albert Einstein Niels Bohr James Franck Gustav Ludwig Hertz Jean-Baptiste Perrin C. V. Raman Werner Heisenberg James Chadwick Clinton Davisson George Paget Thomson Enrico Fermi Ernest Lawrence Otto Stern Felix Bloch Max Born Polykarp Kusch John Bardeen Owen Chamberlain Robert Hofstadter Alfred Kastler Martin Ryle Antony Hewish James Rainwater Burton Richter Robert Woodrow Wilson Abdus Salam Steven Weinberg James Cronin Val Logsdon Fitch Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Carlo Rubbia Simon van der Meer Gerd Binnig Heinrich Rohrer Georg Bednorz Melvin Schwartz Wolfgang Paul Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Bertram Brockhouse Frederick Reines Steven Chu Claude Cohen-Tannoudji Herbert Kroemer Jack Kilby Wolfgang Ketterle Anthony James Leggett David Gross Hugh David Politzer Frank Wilczek Albert Fert Makoto Kobayashi (physicist) Willard Boyle Andre Geim Konstantin Novoselov Saul Perlmutter Brian Schmidt Serge Haroche Peter Higgs George Uhlenbeck Michael Fisher Freeman Dyson Martin Lewis Perl Peter Hirsch Conyers Herring Mitchell Feigenbaum Albert J. Libchaber Herbert Friedman Roger Penrose Stephen Hawking David J. Thouless Maurice Goldhaber Yakir Aharonov Michael Berry (physicist) Bertrand Halperin Daniel Kleppner John Clauser Alain Aspect Anton Zeilinger Maximilian Haider Harald Rose Knut Urban Peter Zoller Integrated Authority File
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