The Advantage of Having a Telescope That Can See Infered

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Light comes in a lot of different flavors. And as far as all the frequencies of light go, reds at the lower end of the spectrum are rid like longer wave lengths and lower energy. This relates to something we were talking about a couple of months ago on our episode on henrietta levitt and the end of the universe. It turned out things that were farther away from us looked redder than the things that are closer to us. Space is expanding, and as light travels through space from those distant galaxies, the light is literally stretched by the expansion of space.

After decades of planning, NASA is finally (finally!) set to launch the successor to the Hubble. The new Webb telescope will be a paradigm shift for astronomy, exploring places in the cosmos that have been completely invisible to us until now. But first, it has to safely reach a point nearly a million miles away from the Earth.

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