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This 115-year-old picture of fingers is one of the first images ever made with x-rays, whose discovery is being feted Monday with an anniversary Google doodle. (See "X-Rays on Google: Surprising Ways the Rays Are Used Today."). The hand belonged to Anna Bertha, wife of German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, the discover of x-rays. The black glob on the fourth finger is a ring made of gold, which absorbs x-rays.
Röntgen stumbled across x-rays on November 8, 1895, while experimenting with an early vacuum tube known as a Crooke's radiometer. He noticed that, when the cathode rays from the tube struck the end of a discharge tube, a previously unknown type of radiation that could penetrate matter was emitted.
Röntgen created the picture of his wife's hand using the unknown, or x, rays a few days later. "She apparently was not impressed by his photography," said Martin Richardson. According to some accounts, Anna exclaimed "I have seen my death!" after seeing the now famous image.
A medical x-ray shows the rib cage of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt after an attempted assassination in 1912 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was campaigning. The nonfatal bullet was never removed.
This radiograph—a picture made on film that's sensitive to radiation other than visible light—shows that x-rays were already being used for medical imaging only 17 years after Wilhelm Röntgen's first experiments with the radiation.
Snapped by NASA's Einstein Observatory, which launched in 1978, this speckled image is one of the first x-ray space telescope images of a cosmic object ever taken. Also known as the High Energy Astronomy Observatory (HEAO)-2, the Einstein Observatory was the largest x-ray telescope of its day. It was also the first one capable of producing actual photographs of x-ray objects.
More than a dozen x-ray telescopes have been launched into space so far. With their aid, astronomers have discovered x-ray sources far beyond our solar system, including distant galaxies and black holes. While black holes themselves emit no light, the environments immediately surrounding black holes are often so turbulent that they shine brightly in x-rays