  Marietta Blau was a Vienna born nuclear physicist who eventually became the
leading expert in the photographic detection of ionizing particles. She studied
physics at the University of Vienna, graduated in 1919. As of 1924, she adapted
the technique of photography for the detection of nuclear particles at the
Vienna Institute for Radium Research. When after years of painstaking
methodical development Blau succeeded in registering tracks of particles, she
and her collaborator Hertha Wambacher further refined the technique and by its
use discovered the star-shaped tracks of reaction fragments from the
interaction of cosmic-ray particles in photographic emulsions, the
disintegration stars, in 1937. Due to her Jewish descent, Blau emigrated in
1938, first to Mexico, later to the U.S. where she had access to scientific
research again in 1948. At Brookhaven National Laboratory and Miami University
she applied the photographic method to reactions induced by high-energy
particles from accelerating machines rather than cosmic rays. When she returned
to Vienna in 1960, she supervised the evaluation of photographic plates from
CERN experiments.
