Cigar Galaxy Blazes with star births at 10 times the rhythm of the Milky Way

Messier 82 blazes with a power of stars formation, producing superclusters which surpass the supercomplustes. Thanks to Hubble and Webb, we can now see its turbulent beauty in extraordinary details, including rare views of Hubble’s high resolution chain.

Heart of the cigar galaxy powered by stars

What is hidden in the thick and dusty clouds of this neighboring galaxy? In its center is the energy nucleus of Messier 82 (M82), more commonly known as the cigar galaxy. Located about 12 million light years from Earth in the Constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear), it ranks among the galaxies closest to us. In this show Hubble space telescope The image, the complex details reveal shiny stars that shine through sculpted clouds, tufts and dust and gas watercourses.

The cigar galaxy is densely filled with stars, many of which are hidden by the striking clouds captured in the image. This galaxy produces new stars at a rate 10 times higher than the Milky Waywinning him the classification of a Starburst galaxy. The burst in the course of stars has created huge clusters of super stars concentrated in its central region. Each of these clusters contains hundreds of thousands of stars and shines much brighter than typical stars groups. Using Hubble’s powerful imaging capacities, astronomers have closely examined these colossal clusters to study how they emerge and change over time.

The telescopes turn to M82

The views of Hubble on the cigar galaxy were presented before, both as a previous photo of the week in 2012 and as an image published to celebrate the 16th anniversary of Hubble. THE James Webb space telescope Also turned to the cigar galaxy, producing infrared images in 2024 and earlier this year.

This image presents something not seen in the previously published hubble images of the galaxy: data from the high resolution channel of the advanced camera for surveys (ACS). The high resolution canal is one of the three ACS sub-educations, which was installed in 2002. In five years of operation, the high resolution channel has returned incredibly detailed observations of congested starry environments such as the center of the Starburst galaxies. An electronic defect in 2007, unfortunately, left the high resolution channel deactivated.

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