"Imagine he's looking at the spectrum of light. He puts his thermometer at the very end of the longest wavelengths, what's going to be your red, your hot wavelengths, and he realizes that his temperature of his thermometer continues to increase in temperature. What does this tell us? This tells us that there's something beyond what we can physically see. There's something beyond that red wavelength that we can see."
"Infrared light is the wavelength or a spectrum of light that goes beyond the visible light spectrum. Like so many other experiments, Sir William Herschel was not actually looking for this infrared light. He couldn't, it's invisible. He was not looking for infrared light, but he stumbled upon it like many great discoveries that you find throughout human history. This is going to be the image of the Tarantula Nebula."
In 1800 Sir William Herschel discovered infrared by measuring rising temperature beyond the red end of the visible spectrum, calling it invisible heat or dark heat. Infrared light occupies wavelengths longer than visible light and enables observation of objects hidden to optical telescopes. Infrared imaging reveals structures such as the Tarantula Nebula and allows detection of very distant, early stars and galaxies, including objects whose light dates back 13 billion years. Modern observatories combine sophisticated hardware and software to capture and process infrared data, producing high-resolution images of obscured and ancient cosmic sources.
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