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9-503: The image was created by compositing 11 individual ACIS-I exposures for a cumulative exposure time of over one million seconds, in the period 1999–2000, by a team led by Riccardo Giacconi . This region was selected for observation because it has much less galactic gas and dust to obscure distant sources. Further observations taken between 2000 and 2010 have resulted in a total of exposure of over four million seconds. An additional four million seconds of exposure are scheduled to be undertaken by

18-469: A small galaxy, known as CDF-S XT1, about 11 billion light years from Earth in the Fornax constellation . Riccardo Giacconi Riccardo Giacconi ( / dʒ ə ˈ k oʊ n i / 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

27-529: 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 ,

36-744: The European Southern Observatory (ESO) from 1993 to 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 ". The other shares of

45-621: 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. Astrophysical X-ray source Too Many Requests If you report this error to

54-477: The central supermassive black holes of distant galaxies , and a better characterization of Type II quasars was obtained. The CDFS discovered over 300 X-ray sources, many of them from "low luminosity" AGN lying about 9 billion light years away. The study also discovered the then most distant Type II quasar, lying at redshift z=3.7, some 12 billion light years away. In 2014 and 2015 astronomers detected four very intense burst of X-rays, currently unexplained, from

63-540: The end of 2015, resulting in an integrated exposure time of eight million seconds. The Chandra Deep Field South is the single target where Chandra has observed the longest. Multispectral observations of the region were carried out in collaboration with the Very Large Telescope and the Paranal Observatory . Through the course of these investigations, the X-ray background was determined to have originated from

72-660: 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 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 ). This was followed by Director General of

81-720: Was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University . Born in Genoa , Italy, Giacconi received his Laurea from the Physics Department of 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

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