Miles O’Brien:
Well, James Webb does its business in the infrared spectrum, which allows it to see deeper in time. As objects move away from us, as they are post-Big Bang, they move into the infrared spectrum, and you can’t see them with visible light telescopes. So that’s number one.
Number two, James Webb, because of that capability, can see through very thick dust clouds, and that’s how it was able to resolve all of this. But, in addition to that, it used a trick borrowed from nature itself. As they were looking toward this particular Firefly Sparkle Galaxy, this cluster, they were looking through yet another formation, which bent the light from Firefly Sparkle.
And what that does is, it focuses the light not unlike a magnifying glass in a way that allows the telescope to get a free assist from nature and see the focused light more easily than it would on its own. So it’s a combination of a fabulous telescope in space that works in the infrared using a trick, the bending of light by virtue of the gravitational pull of a galaxy, to focus the light better so we can see it.
