Purdue professor to lead mission analyzing photos from James Webb Space Telescope

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — The way we see the universe has changed.

President Joe Biden on Monday revealed one of the first images from the James Webb Space Telecope, the most powerful telescope in the world. Webb is considered the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope.

More new images from the telescope were released Tuesday by NASA. These photos represent the farthest humanity has ever seen in both time and distance, NASA says.

Danny Milisavljevic, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University’s College of Science, will lead the mission to analyze the photos. He will lead a team of nearly 40 scientists from more than 30 institutions.

“There’s a lot of important developmental stuff that happened in those earliest phases. That’s what we are missing in our understanding of the universe,” Milisavljevic said. “So Webb will be pushing back into the earliest stages of when the first stars and galaxies formed in our universe.”

Milisavljevic says Hubble reached as far back as 13 billion years ago in our universe.

“Webb will go a few 100 million years deeper than that,” Milisavljevic said.

Milisavljevic says there are two major benefits to using the telescope. The first is that it’s decades in the making. And the second is, the amount of raw data researchers will get to use for observations for research.

Some of the images released Tuesday include a view of a giant gaseous planet outside our solar system and a nebula where stars are born and die.