Marc Huertas-Company

If you photograph the same mountain with a film camera and a modern smartphone, you get different images: colors are brighter in one, details are blurrier in the other. The same goes for telescopes: each instrument sees the sky in its own way, adding its own distortions to the true light of galaxies, like a filter through which we look.

Right after the Big Bang, the Universe was a chemical desert — only hydrogen and helium, not a hint of metals. But moments passed (by cosmic standards), and the birth of the first stars — Population III — began.