Man, listening to these NASA people you'd think infrared was the greatest invention since the yellow first down line. Are they really trying to explain a chart showing a spectrograph of an exoplanet in the near infrared?
Come on. No more infrared boosterism. Let's see some images!
Well, I think in terms of deep space exploration, the ability to use infrared like the supercooled JWST uses it is, yeah, pretty much one of the greatest leaps in the history of astrophysics.
Am I the only one who says in-frared?
Extremely distant object like the ones JWST will be targeting are red shifted so much that visible light from them is stretched out to infrared wavelengths.
That's one reason why infrared is a big deal.
Far infrared is a big deal because it's really hard to do. Everything is just too damn hot.
So the scientific mind is to dump their knowledge organized by logical foundations. It is the way every textbook is structured and the way no actual scientist has ever worked. But instead of learning things as you need them, you have to be Prepared by learning all the theory all at once and only then passing through specific examples. So you can't understand an infrared image until you know what infrared is, and you can't know what that is until you understand the spectrum and electromagnetic waves. You're lucky you didn't have to sit through a lecture on black body radiation.