News NASA's Swift Satellite Discovers a New Black Hole in our Galaxy NASA's Swift satellite recently detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, announced the presence of a previously unknown stellar-mass black hole. Full Story More News: X-ray 'Echoes' Map a Supermassive Black Hole's Environs NASA's RXTE Detects 'Heartbeat' of Smallest Black Hole Candidate News Archive Special Exhibit Celebrating 50 Years of X-ray Astronomy The history and future of X-ray astronomy is a story best told by its participants, so we asked six scientists to share their memories, impressions and thoughts about a field that couldn't exist before the Space Age. Their views of the past, present and future of X-ray astronomy reveal just how far the field has come in half a century. Read more. Special Feature Featured Scientist: Dr. Joanne 'Joe' Hill Joanne "Joe" Hill was born in the UK, in Leicester, about 100 miles north of London. She grew up in a small village of 100 houses, and as a child she attended a small school with about 80 people. Later, she attended the University of Leicester because it had a strong space program. There, she was able to learn to build instrumentation that would be able to survive the space environment, which is the area of astronomy she most wanted to go into. "Ultimately, I wanted to be an astronaut. That was one of the drives behind it," she said. Read more. Featured Scientist Archive