| Well, in Hubble's defense, pluto is a tremendously small object very far away. Hubble was made to image very, very, very large things at a stupendous distance away (plus we've got new horizon's which is awesome). Don't forget that up until hubble we had no real idea if the universe was closed, open, or would reach a homeostatic point. With Hubble's measurement of Hubble's constant, and the fact that the speed at which things are moving away from each other is speeding up, it answered a major question; that our galaxy is an open one. Hubble was really built to answer that question, which brought dark energy to the forefront. Everything else about Hubble was a bonus.
Honestly I can't think of anything that chandra could have observed that have been sought after for 50 years. Well, one thing; superstrings. Perhaps Chandra was able to image gravitic lensing from one from an xray source? But that doesn't necessarily pertain to our galaxy either.
P.S. Pulsars, magnetars, and neutron stars are all the same thing with different characteristics that make them detectable :P But yeah, not all stars go nova, only relatively massive ones where the collapsing mass is enough to overcome the neutron degeneracy pressure. Brown dwarfs I don't think are a step on the path of stellar evolution, or at least my H-R diagram never included them. |