Ultimately the telescope will be directed at darker corners of the universe, testing its capacity to pick up ever-fainter celestial images. Conventional wisdom is that those blank spaces are fainter because the stars are more distant. Looking into those depths, scientists also will be looking farther back in time and perhaps learn more about the origin and evolution of the universe. We're talking about objects like black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs that have intense gravity and magnetic fields. Every star dies eventually.
Black holes are formed by the collapse of massive stars, stars many times the size of our own sun.
The gravitational force created in such a cataclysm is so strong that not even light can escape. Neutron stars also are created by collapsing stars, but unlike black holes, neutron stars do not collapse completely and instead compact into extremely dense objects that emit a great deal of high-energy radiation. White dwarfs are created when stars about the size of our own sun die. Cordova, who was NASA's chief scientist from 1993 to 1996 before coming to UCSB, has high hopes for the space telescope that was launched in December from ESA's center in French Guyana. We will be observing bright binary stars in nearby galaxies, and pulsars and cataclysmic variables in our own galaxy.