Pioneers of the Invisible Universe
WALK OUTSIDE TONIGHT and you’ll see stars twinkling in their constellations, while planets wander predictably among them. Only the occasional nova or eclipse mars the seemingly immutable heavens.
But what if we swapped this tame view with X-ray vision? Hot and violent sources would flare across the sky; Aristotle would never have spoken of immutability under such a sight.
Fortunately for philosophers (and for life itself), Earth’s atmosphere has long shielded against doctrine-and DNA-destroying X-rays. Humanity had graduated to space before we realised what we were missing. The first hints of an X-ray-emitting universe came from rocket and balloon observations of the Sun, starting in 1949. But solar emissions were so weak — a million times fainter than visible light — that to see even nearby stars, detectors would have had to be a thousand times more sensitive. Scientists doubted other cosmic X-ray sources could be observed. In fact, NASA rebuffed scientist Riccardo Giacconi (then at American Science & Engineering, AS&E) when he submitted a proposal for a rocket to observe X-rays from across the sky.
Undeterred, Giacconi reworked his proposal for the US Air Force. The solar wind, he argued, could fluoresce off the Moon with possible impacts on communications. The Air Force accepted his proposal and in 1962, after two failed attempts, Giacconi and his team finally launched an Aerobee rocket from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The rocket flew above 80 kilometres — where the atmosphere thins enough for X-rays to pass through — for all of 5 minutes and 50 seconds. But during that brief time, it caught something: a bright X-ray source nowhere near the Moon, dubbed Scorpius X-1 for its location on the sky. Turns out, Sco X-1 is the brightest known enduring X-ray source outside the Solar System. But the rocket launched by Giacconi’s team might easily have missed it: A big chunk of sky was hidden behind Earth during the nearly six minutes the rocket was aloft. The discovery was fortunate indeed for Giacconi, as it played a key role in winning him the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics. But it was even more fortunate for X-ray astronomy, galvanising the field as well as the imagination. “It was pretty hard to explain [Sco X-1] by anything except something that
