Riccardo Giacconi

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Riccardo Giacconi

National Medal of Science award ceremony, 2003

Born 6 October 1931

Genoa, Kingdom of Italy

Died 9 December 2018 (aged 87)

San Diego, California, U.S.

Nationality Italian

American

Alma mater University of Milan

Known for Astrophysics

Awards Elliott Cresson Medal (1980)

Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics (1981)

Nobel Prize in Physics (2002)

 Scientific career

Fields Physics

Institutions Johns Hopkins University

Chandra X-ray Observatory

Riccardo Giacconi (/dʒəˈkoʊni/ jə-KOH-nee, Italian: [rikˈkardo dʒakˈkoːni]; October 6, 1931

– December 9, 2018) was an Italian-American Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who laid
down the foundations of X-ray astronomy. He was a professor at the Johns Hopkins
University.

Contents

 1Biography
 2Honors and awards
 3References
 4Further reading
 5External links

Biography[edit]
Born in Genoa, Italy, Giacconi received his Laurea from the University of Milan before
moving to the US to pursue a career in astrophysics research. In 1956, his Fulbright
Fellowship led him to go to the United States to collaborate with physics professor R. W.
Thompson at Indiana University.
Since cosmic X-ray radiation is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, space-based
telescopes are needed for X-ray astronomy. Applying himself to this problem, Giacconi
worked on the instrumentation for X-ray astronomy; from rocket-borne detectors in the late
1950s and early 1960s, to Uhuru, the first orbiting X-ray astronomy satellite, in the 1970s.
Giacconi's pioneering research continued in 1978 with the Einstein Observatory, the first
fully imaging X-ray telescope put into space, and later with the Chandra X-ray Observatory,
which was launched in 1999 and is still in operation. Giacconi also applied his expertise to
other fields of astronomy, becoming the first permanent director (1981-1993) of the Space
Telescope Science Institute (the science operations center for the Hubble Space
Telescope), followed by Director General of the European Southern Observatory (ESO)
from 1993–1999, overseeing the construction of the Very Large Telescope, then President
of Associated Universities, Inc. (1999-2004) managing the early years of the ALMA array.
Giacconi was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 "for pioneering
contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources".
[1]
 The other shares of the Prize in that year were awarded to Masatoshi
Koshiba and Raymond Davis, Jr. for neutrino astronomy.
Giacconi held the positions of professor of physics and astronomy (1982–1997) and
research professor (from 1998 to his death in 2018) at Johns Hopkins University, and was
a university professor. During the 2000s he was principal investigator for the major
Chandra Deep Field-South project with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Giacconi died
on December 9, 2018.[2][3][4]

Honors and awards[edit]

 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy (1966)
 Bruce Medal (1981)[5]
 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1981)
 Heineman Prize (1981)
 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1982)
 Wolf Prize in Physics (1987)
 Nobel Prize in Physics (2002)
 National Medal of Science (2003)
 Asteroid 3371 Giacconi