M81 Bode Galaxy and M82 Cigar Galaxy are tidally locked to each other and interact with each other to create galaxies with rich star formations.
M81, the Bode Galaxy is the spiral galaxy, which faces us side on, as is found in the constellation Ursa Major. It is in the local group of galaxies and is of close proximity to Earth with a large size and active galactic nucleus, which harbours a 70 million M supermassive black hole.
It is located 11.6 million light-years from Earth and has an apparent magnitude of 6.9. Through a pair of binoculars, the galaxy appears as a faint patch of light in the same field of view as M82. A small telescope will resolve M81’s core. The galaxy is best observed during April.
The galaxy’s spiral arms, which wind all the way down into its nucleus, are made up of young, bluish, hot stars formed in the past few million years. They also host a population of stars formed in an episode of star formation that started about 600 million years ago. Ultraviolet light from hot, young stars is fluorescing the surrounding clouds of hydrogen gas. A number of sinuous dust lanes also wind all the way into the nucleus of M81.
The galaxy’s central bulge contains much older, redder stars. It is significantly larger than the Milky Way’s bulge. A black hole of 70 million solar masses resides at the center of M81 and is about 15 times the mass of the Milky Way’s central black hole. Previous Hubble research showed that the size of the black hole in a galaxy’s nucleus is proportional to the mass of the galaxy’s bulge.
M82, the Cigar, is a near neighbour as galaxies go, and is a favourite for amateur astronomers and researchers alike with its thick dust bands, sprays of hydrogen gas, and bright centre undergoing massive star formation.
The Galaxy shines brightly at infrared wavelengths and is remarkable for its star formation activity. The Cigar galaxy experiences gravitational interactions with its galactic neighbour, 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.
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A older picture taken with my DSLR Includes a supernova in the Cigar, which is not present in later years. |