THE DISCOVERY OF COSMIC X-RAY SOURCES.

GIACCONI, RICCARDO & HERBERT GURSKY & FRANK R. PAOLINI & BRUNO B. ROSSI.

Evidence for X Rays from Sources Outside the Solar System.

(New York), American physical Society, 1962. Lex8vo. Volume 9, No. 11, December 1, 1962 of "Physical Review Letters", In the original printed blue wrappers. A very nice and clean copy externally as well as internally, near mint. Pp. 439-443. [Entire issue: 439-477].

First printing of Giocconi's seminal paper in which the discovery of cosmic x-ray sources is presented for the first time, thereby documenting the first observation of an x-ray source outside the Solar System. The x-ray detector was launched on a rocket to look for x-ray emissions from the Moon; instead they found a bright source of soft x-rays in the constellation Scorpius. This source, now known as Scorpius X-1, is the brightest x-ray source in the sky after the Sun. It has since been identified as a neutron star in a binary-star system some 9,000 light years away.

The discovery had immense consequences for cosmology, since Hoyle's Hot Universe continuous creation theory could not account for this emission. Riccardo Giacconi received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 for his discovery.

Order-nr.: 43476