Beyond Hubble: To the Edge of Light

Whenever you build a new way of looking at the Universe - that's what a new
telescope is - that goes beyond what you had last, it changes your view of
the world.

Hubble gives a gain over the human eye of ten billion times - that is, we
see ten billion times fainter with Hubble than we can with the unaided eye.

We really are after four basic scientific questions, which are, ultimately,
basic human and philosophical questions.  And they include:

How did the universe originate?

How did we get here?

Where are we going?

Are we alone?

Hubble has made a great contribution showing that the expanding cloud of
hydrogen formed into these big things we call galaxies - the largest
conglomerates of matter in the universe - much, much earlier than theory
had predicted.

Hubble has proven that supermassive black holes - objects that are a
billion, or two billion, times the mass of our Sun and are so crunched
down that the speed of escape from these objects is greater than the speed
of light, so nothing can get out - perhaps that says something about the
ultimate fate of the universe.  Will it all turn into a black hole some
time?  We don't know.  But we do know that black holes are no longer
science fiction.  They're science fact.

Hubble has made great contributions in showing us the existence of many,
many planetary disks - that is, disks of dust and gas around young stars
that slowly form into planets.  They're common.  The process for producing
planets is very, very common.

So... Hubble is just the first in an armada of space science satellites
that will attack those four basic questions over the next hundred years.

The Next Generation Space Telescope is designed to go so far beyond Hubble
that we see the edge of light in the universe.

The telescope will be more sensitive, first, just because it will be
bigger.  The Hubble telescope is about two point four meters in diameter.
The Next Generation Space Telescope will be eight meters in diameter.

Because it is so much bigger, it will be that much more sensitive.

So the pictures that will be returned from the NGST will be every bit as
beautiful as the pictures of the Hubble.  Except, they'll be almost a
thousand times more sensitive and they'll be looking at objects in the
very distant reaches of the universe that we haven't yet seen because
Hubble can't go that far.

And in a nutshell, that's what we hope to see - we hope to see the place
where there's no more light!

That will allow us, then, to watch this whole epic of galaxies being
born...

of the stars being created...

the light turning on...

assembling into galaxies...

the galaxies assembling through collisions.

But every time we put a telescope up, we discover new things.