Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa)  ·  Contains:  Cigar Galaxy  ·  HD85161  ·  M 82  ·  NGC 3034  ·  PGC 2730379  ·  PGC 2730409  ·  PGC 2730709  ·  PGC 2731294  ·  PGC 2732102  ·  PGC 2732338  ·  PGC 2732720  ·  PGC 2732797  ·  PGC 2733060  ·  PGC 3086325  ·  PGC 3097961
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M 82, Arp 337, Mau_Bard
M 82, Arp 337, Mau_Bard

M 82, Arp 337

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M 82, Arp 337, Mau_Bard
M 82, Arp 337, Mau_Bard

M 82, Arp 337

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Description

M82
M82 or Cigar galaxy or Arp337, shines brightly at infrared wavelengths and is remarkable for its star formation activity. The Cigar galaxy experiences gravitational interactions with its galactic neighbor, M81, causing it to have an extraordinarily high rate of star formation — a starburst.

Around the galaxy’s center, young stars are being born 10 times faster than they are inside our entire Milky Way galaxy. Radiation and energetic particles from these newborn stars carve into the surrounding gas, and the resulting galactic wind compresses enough gas to make millions of more stars. 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 will then subside, probably in a few tens of millions of years.

M82 was discovered, along with its neighbor M81, by the German astronomer Johann Elert Bode in 1774. Located 12 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major, M82 has an apparent magnitude of 8.4 and is best observed in April. It has a diameter of 41000 light years, less then half of our Milky Way.

(Text excerpted from www.nasa.gov)

Background Galaxies
The background is dotted by many distant galaxies, many of which have no classification or measurements. To get an idea of the space depth we are seeing here, one of the small galaxies in the lower left corner of the picture, PGC2732338, has a radial velocity of 57485 km/s corresponding to a Hubble distance of 2.5 billion light years.

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