Enrico Costa

Enrico Costa is an Italian astrophysicist born in 1944 in Sassari, Sardinia, known for his studies of gamma ray bursts. His family moved to Rome in 1954, where he studied physics and earned his doctorate under Giulio Auriemma while working on rocket experiments with X-ray detectors at the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale in Rome. He joined the institute in 1976 and contributed to balloon experiments and later the BeppoSAX satellite project from 1996 to 2003; on February 28, 1997 his team made the first observation of an X-ray afterglow associated with a gamma ray burst. He later developed detectors for the AGILE satellite and X-ray polarimeters, and he shared the 2011 Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Gerald J. Fishman.