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From AviationWeek.com Homepage:
 Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini South
telescope in Chile to peer nearly 11 billion years into the past have
discovered stars in a small, distant galaxy moving at speeds of 1
million miles per hour – roughly twice the speed at which our sun moves
through the Milky Way.
Scientists were able to determine the overall motions of the stars
using a technique similar to the way police use lasers to catch
speeding cars, according to study lead Pieter van Dokkum, a professor
of astronomy and physics at Yale University. The observations could
shed light on how early galaxies that were only a fraction the size of
ours could have evolved over time into the larger galaxies seen today.
"This galaxy is very small, but the stars are whizzing around as if
they were in a giant galaxy that we would find closer to us and not so
far back in time," van Dokkum says. How such galaxies — which packed so
much mass into a small volume — could have formed in the early
universe, and why they are not still seen in the recent, nearby
universe is still a mystery.
"One possibility is that we are looking at what will eventually be
the dense central region of a very large galaxy," says team member
Marijn Franx of Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The Hubble observations were made with the Near Infrared Camera and
Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). The next step for the group will be
to use the recently serviced telescope's newly installed Wide Field
Camera 3, which should be able to see even older galaxies.
The group's results appear in the August 6 issue of the journal Nature, with a companion paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
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