Cosmic X-ray Background

cosmic X-ray background, X-ray radiation pervading the universe. In 1962 the first X-ray detectors were flown above Earth’s X-ray-absorbing atmosphere in a sounding rocket. In addition to discovering the first cosmic X-ray source, Scorpius X-1, astronomers were also puzzled by a uniform glow of X-rays with energies greater than 1.5 keV (1 keV = 1,000 electron volts) coming from all directions. The radiation did not appear to arise from identifiable objects. The X-ray background seemed to be extragalactic, and a uniform plasma at a temperature of roughly 10⁸ K was a possible source. (Italian-born American physicist Riccardo Giacconi, who led the team that discovered Scorpius X-1 and the cosmic background, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2002 for founding X-ray astronomy.) The launch in 1978 of an imaging X-ray telescope aboard the Einstein Observatory, however, showed that a large fraction of the seemingly diffuse background of X-rays, perhaps all of it, could be accounted for by a superposition of unresolved point sources—i.e., quasars.

Subsequent research demonstrated that the shape of the X-ray spectrum of these objects at low redshifts did not match that of the diffuse background. The Chandra X-ray Observatory’s high-angular-resolution capability finally allowed the radiation to be resolved into its sources, and it was found that about 75 percent of the X-ray background radiation was produced by roughly 70 million discrete sources uniformly spread over the sky. About one-third of the detected sources appeared to be galaxies lying at great distances from Earth and so were being observed as they existed in the very early universe. At the centre of each galaxy was thought to be a massive black hole accreting gas from its surroundings. As the gas fell in, it heated up and radiated X-rays. Many of these X-ray-emitting galaxies had not yet been detected at optical wavelengths, possibly because they were formed early enough in the history of the universe that their relative optical and X-ray emissions were quite different from those typically found in nearby (and, hence, older-appearing) galaxies.