To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope's 16 years in orbit, NASA and ESA have released this image of the starburst galaxy Messier 82. The mosaic image represents the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82.
The galaxy is remarkable for its bright blue disk, webs of shredded clouds, and fiery-looking plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out of its central regions.
Throughout the galaxy's center, young stars are being born 10 times faster than they are in the Milky Way. The resulting huge concentration of young stars carved into the gas and dust at the galaxy's center. The fierce galactic superwind generated from these stars compresses enough gas to make millions of more stars.
In M82, young stars are crammed into tiny but massive star clusters. These, in turn, congregate by the dozens to make the bright patches, or starburst clumps, as astronomers call them, in the central parts of M82. The clusters in the clumps can only be distinguished in the sharp Hubble images. Most of the pale, white objects sprinkled around the body of M82 that look like fuzzy stars are actually individual star clusters about 20 light-years across and contain up to a million stars.
Astronomers think the rapid rate of star formation in this galaxy eventually will be self-limiting. When star formation becomes too vigorous, it will consume or destroy the material needed to make more stars. The starburst then will subside, probably in a few tens of millions of years.
Located 12 million light-years away, M82 appears high in the northern spring sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It is also called the Cigar Galaxy, because of the elliptical shape produced by the oblique tilt of its starry disk relative to its line of sight.
Hubble completed the observation last month with its Advanced Camera for Surveys' Wide Field Channel, and astronomers assembled the six-image mosaic by combining exposures taken with four colored filters that capture starlight from visible and infrared wavelengths, as well as the light from the glowing hydrogen filaments.
Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard space shuttle Discovery.
