Riccardo Giacconi

Riccardo Giacconi was born in Italy on October 6, 1931, and crossed the Atlantic to become the architect of an entirely new field. He laid down the foundations of X-ray astronomy — the science of detecting high-energy radiation from distant cosmic objects — and built the tools that made it possible. The work earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics and a professorship at Johns Hopkins University. He died on December 9, 2018, having spent a lifetime teaching the world to see what had always been there, just beyond the edge of light.