Decades of hard work by thousands of scientists and engineers culminated in the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on December 25, 2021. Like other space observatories before it, such as Herschel and Gaia, JWST travelled to a location in space lying 1.5 million kilometres away, known as the second Lagrange Point, or L2. In the following months, the instruments cooled down, and following their testing and calibration, the first, highly anticipated images from JWST were released this week, heralding a new era in astronomy. JWST is tuned to observe in the infrared, that is the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that lies beyond the red portion of visible light. While JWST is not the first infrared space telescope, it is by far the most sensitive. Moreover, it boasts the highest resolution in the infrared regime to date. But why infrared? A principal reason is that as the universe expands in size, light is shifted to redder wavelengths, and the more distant an object is, the larger this shift. This phenomenon is called redshift. Let us consider a simple analogy by way of explanation. Imagine two ants standing on opposite ends of a ruler 10 centimetres long. Now...