Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin may be former football rivals, but the Lone Star State's two research giants have teamed up to detect the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy ever found -- one created within 700 million years after the Big Bang.
With the help of a special spectroscopic camera developed by a Texas Tech University physicist, researchers at Caltech and Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network captured rare images of a star in another galaxy going supernova within a day of the star’s explosion.
Using gravitational “lenses” in space, University of Utah astronomers discovered that the centers of the biggest galaxies are growing denser – evidence of repeated collisions and mergers by massive galaxies with 100 billion stars.