Every field of astrophysics - whether it's our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe - every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.
My favorite galaxy of all is called the Sombrero, NGC 4594. It's an amazing galaxy that is really two galaxies in one.
Dark matter is one of the dominant constituents of the universe, which piled up in certain parts of the universe due to gravity, and in those regions, galaxies were formed. It is the unseen thing that holds the universe together.
We were looking almost one-tenth of the way to the edge of the universe. We're planning to use the facilities we have to make improvements by another factor of 10... a strain sensitivity that is 10 times smaller. This means looking 10 times further out into the universe.
As an astrophysicist, my research work involves mapping dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for about a quarter of our universe.
If you take a galaxy and try to make it bigger, it becomes a cluster of galaxies, not a galaxy. If you try to make it smaller than that, it seems to blow itself apart.
The Next Generation Space Telescope, which will be located much further away from the Earth than the Hubble Space Telescope presently is, will also explore the infrared part of the spectrum.
The early universe was a dusty place, and the UV radiation from the hot, young black holes and stars would get enshrouded by dust, re-radiated, and scattered into red wavelengths like infra-red, causing these objects to remain obscured.
