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Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

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How does the camera on the James Webb Space Telescope work and see so far out? – Kieran G., age 12, Minnesota

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Imagine a camera so powerful it can see light from galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago. That’s exactly what NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is built to do.

Since it launched in December 2021, Webb has been orbiting more than a million miles from Earth, capturing breathtaking images of deep space. But how does it actually work? And how can it see so far? The secret lies in its powerful cameras – especially ones that don’t see light the way our eyes do.

I’m an astrophysicist who studies galaxies and supermassive black holes, and the Webb telescope is an incredible tool for observing some of the earliest galaxies and black holes in the universe.

When Webb takes a picture of a distant galaxy, astronomers like me are actually seeing what that galaxy looked like billions of years ago. The light from that galaxy has been traveling across space for the billions of years it takes to reach the telescope’s mirror. It’s like having a time machine that takes snapshots of the early universe.

By using a giant mirror to collect ancient light, Webb has been discovering new secrets about the universe.

A telescope that sees heat

Unlike regular cameras or even the Hubble Space Telescope, which take images of visible light, Webb is designed to see a kind of light that’s invisible to your eyes: infrared light. Infrared light has longer wavelengths than visible light, which is why our eyes can’t detect it. But with the right instruments, Webb can capture infrared light to study some of the earliest and most distant objects in the universe.

Although the human eye cannot see it, people can detect infrared light as a form of heat using specialized technology, such as infrared cameras or thermal sensors. For example, night-vision goggles use infrared light to detect warm objects in the dark. Webb uses the same idea to study stars, galaxies and planets.

Why infrared? When visible light from faraway galaxies travels across the universe, it stretches out. This is because the universe is expanding. That stretching turns visible light into infrared light. So, the most distant galaxies in space don’t shine in visible light anymore – they glow in faint infrared. That’s the light Webb is built to detect.

A golden mirror to gather the faintest glow

Before the light reaches the cameras, it first has to be collected by the Webb telescope’s enormous golden mirror. This mirror is over 21 feet (6.5 meters) wide and made of 18 smaller mirror pieces that fit together like a honeycomb. It’s coated in a thin layer of real gold – not just to look fancy, but because gold reflects infrared light extremely well.

The mirror gathers light from deep space and reflects it into the telescope’s instruments. The bigger the mirror, the more light it can collect – and the farther it can see. Webb’s mirror is the largest ever launched into space.

Inside the cameras: NIRCam and MIRI

The most important “eyes” of the telescope are two science instruments that act like cameras: NIRCam and MIRI.

NIRCam stands for near-infrared camera. It’s the primary camera on Webb and takes stunning images of galaxies and stars. It also has a coronagraph – a device that blocks out starlight so it can photograph very faint objects near bright sources, such as planets orbiting bright stars.

NIRCam works by imaging near-infrared light, the type closest to what human eyes can almost see, and splitting it into different wavelengths. This helps scientists learn not just what something looks like but what it’s made of. Different materials in space absorb and emit infrared light at specific wavelengths, creating a kind of unique chemical fingerprint. By studying these fingerprints, scientists can uncover the properties of distant stars and galaxies.

MIRI, or the mid-infrared instrument, detects longer infrared wavelengths, which are especially useful for spotting cooler and dustier objects, such as stars that are still forming inside clouds of gas. MIRI can even help find clues about the types of molecules in the atmospheres of planets that might support life.

Both cameras are far more sensitive than the standard cameras used on Earth. NIRCam and MIRI can detect the tiniest amounts of heat from billions of light-years away. If you had Webb’s NIRCam as your eyes, you could see the heat from a bumblebee on the Moon. That’s how sensitive it is.

Because Webb is trying to detect faint heat from faraway objects, it needs to keep itself as cold as possible. That’s why it carries a giant sun shield about the size of a tennis court. This five-layer sun shield blocks heat from the Sun, Earth and even the Moon, helping Webb stay incredibly cold: around -370 degrees F (-223 degrees C).

MIRI needs to be even colder. It has its own special refrigerator, called a cryocooler, to keep it chilled to nearly -447 degrees F (-266 degrees C). If Webb were even a little warm, its own heat would drown out the distant signals it’s trying to detect.

Turning space light into pictures

Once light reaches the Webb telescope’s cameras, it hits sensors called detectors. These detectors don’t capture regular photos like a phone camera. Instead, they convert the incoming infrared light into digital data. That data is then sent back to Earth, where scientists process it into full-color images.

The colors we see in Webb’s pictures aren’t what the camera “sees” directly. Because infrared light is invisible, scientists assign colors to different wavelengths to help us understand what’s in the image. These processed images help show the structure, age and composition of galaxies, stars and more.

By using a giant mirror to collect invisible infrared light and sending it to super-cold cameras, Webb lets us see galaxies that formed just after the universe began.

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And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

GA, UNITED STATES, June 30, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ — How animals sense and respond to smells plays a pivotal role in their survival, communication, and evolution. Recently, a groundbreaking online database has compiled the most expansive collection of olfactory receptor (OR) genes ever assembled in chordates—animals with backbones. Encompassing over 1.1 million sequences across nearly 2,800 species, this resource offers a unified platform for exploring both functional genes and pseudogenes. It integrates advanced tools for visualizing molecular structures, mapping odor interactions, and analyzing evolutionary relationships. With its comprehensive design, the database opens new avenues for researchers to decode how animals perceive chemical cues and adapt to diverse ecological environments.

Olfactory receptors (ORs) are key to how animals perceive their surroundings, guiding behaviors like foraging, mating, and avoiding danger. In chordates, the genes encoding these receptors are remarkably diverse and evolve rapidly, shaped by species-specific environmental pressures. Despite the explosion of genomic data in recent years, the annotation of these genes has struggled to keep pace. Many species still lack reliable OR gene catalogs, and most existing databases focus narrowly—often omitting pseudogenes or comparative frameworks. These limitations hinder the broader understanding of OR gene function and evolution. Due to these issues, a comprehensive and scalable platform for OR annotation and integration is urgently needed.

To meet this need, researchers from ShanghaiTech University and Research Center for Life Sciences Computing, Zhejiang Lab, etc. have developed the chordata olfactory receptor database (CORD), published (DOI: 10.1093/procel/pwae050) in Protein & Cell on September 20, 2024. The online platform compiles and standardizes more than 1.1 million OR gene entries from 2,776 chordate species, offering a massive leap in the coverage, consistency, and accessibility of olfactory genomic data. By integrating functional receptors, pseudogenes, and odorant-interaction data, CORD sets a new benchmark for studying the genetic basis of smell across evolutionary lineages.

At the heart of CORD lies Genome2OR, a high-performance gene annotation tool built on hidden Markov models. Its latest update simplifies the annotation pipeline and supports custom profiles, enabling the accurate identification of over 663,000 functional ORs and more than 513,000 pseudogenes. The database spans seven major chordate groups—from mammals and birds to jawless fish—highlighting the evolutionary richness of olfactory systems. CORD’s interface is designed with researchers in mind, featuring nine functional modules for genome browsing, structural prediction, and comparative analysis. Tools include BLAST search, sequence logos (WebLogo), and OpenFold-based 3D modeling. Users can explore complex gene–odorant relationships, supported by 3,118 receptor–ligand pairs and data on nearly 24,000 odorant compounds. Advanced visualization techniques such as snake diagrams and interactive heatmaps reveal how ORs are structured and distributed across species. Further, protein clustering datasets (CORDclust30–90) and community network analysis offer new insight into OR gene families and their evolutionary pathways. Altogether, CORD blends depth with usability, empowering researchers to unravel the biology of smell with unprecedented precision.

Scent is one of the most ancient and intricate senses, said Dr. Suwen Zhao, one of the co-corresponding authors. Yet until now, researchers lacked a unified, scalable tool to study the extraordinary diversity of ORs in chordates. CORD fills this gap. It not only delivers a vast quantity of high-quality data, but it also makes that data discoverable and usable across disciplines—from molecular neuroscience to comparative genomics. Dr. Zhao highlighted the database’s potential to illuminate how olfactory genes function beyond the nose, impacting broader biological processes.

With its wide-ranging data and flexible interface, CORD is poised to transform multiple research fields. Evolutionary biologists can now trace how OR gene repertoires expand and contract across ecological niches. Biomedical researchers gain a new tool to study the role of ORs in conditions like inflammation, metabolic disorders, and cancer—where these receptors are increasingly found outside the nose. In computational biology, CORD’s modular structure supports machine learning applications for modeling protein–ligand interactions. Future updates will incorporate experimentally derived OR structures, integrate AlphaFold3-based odor–receptor simulations, and launch a genome browser to map gene neighborhoods. By unifying data and tools under one roof, CORD is set to propel olfaction research into its next frontier.

DOI
10.1093/procel/pwae050

Original Source URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/procel/pwae050

Funding information
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Programs of China (2022YFA1302900, S.Z.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32122024, S.Z.), Shanghai Frontiers Science Center for Biomacromolecules and Precision Medicine, the Shanghai Science and Technology Plan (21DZ2260400) and ShanghaiTech University.

Lucy Wang
BioDesign Research
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