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APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 4:05 am
by APOD Robot
Image M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind

Explanation: Why is the Cigar Galaxy billowing red smoke? M82, as this starburst galaxy is also known, was stirred up by a recent pass near large spiral galaxy M81. This doesn't fully explain the source of the red-glowing outwardly expanding gas and dust, however. Evidence indicates that this gas and dust is being driven out by the combined emerging particle winds of many stars, together creating a galactic superwind. The dust particles are thought to originate in M82's interstellar medium and are actually similar in size to particles in cigar smoke. The featured photographic mosaic highlights a specific color of red light strongly emitted by ionized hydrogen gas, showing detailed filaments of this gas and dust. The filaments extend for over 10,000 light years. The 12-million light-year distant Cigar Galaxy is the brightest galaxy in the sky in infrared light and can be seen in visible light with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Great Bear (Ursa Major).

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Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 5:28 am
by AVAO
APOD Gallery

2023 August 2: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind
Image
NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & Copyright: Harshwardhan Pathak
Filters: Infrared I (814 nm), Optical V (555 nm), Optical B (435 nm), Optical H- Alpha( 658 nm)
Processing software: FITS Liberator, Pixinsight and Adobe Photoshop


2023 January 20: Galaxy Wars: M81 and M82 viewtopic.php?t=42891
Image
Image Credit & Copyright: Andreas Aufschnaiter
2020 May 15: Galaxy Wars: M81 and M82 viewtopic.php?t=40564
Image
Image Credit & Copyright: Dietmar Hager, Torsten Grossmann
2017 June 27: The M81 Galaxy Group through the Integrated Flux Nebula viewtopic.php?t=37327
Image
Image Credit & Copyright : D. Lopez & A. Rosenberg, IAC
2016 February 3: Galaxy Wars: M81 versus M82 viewtopic.php?t=35615
Image
Image Credit & Copyright: Andr? van der Hoeven, Neil Fleming & Michael Van Doorn
2014 August 16 No X-rays from SN 2014J viewtopic.php?t=33763
Image
Image Credit: NASA / CXC / SAO / R. Margutti et al.
2013 September 25: M81 versus M82 viewtopic.php?t=32195
Image
Image Credit & Copyright: Ivan Eder
2013 July 4: M82: Starburst Galaxy with a Superwind lost link
Image
Image Credit & Copyright: Ken Crawford (Rancho Del Sol Obs.)
2010 December 19: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind lost link
Image
Credit: NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team, (STScI / AURA) Acknowledgement: M. Mountain (STScI), P. Puxley (NSF), J. Gallagher (U. Wisconsin)
2006 April 14 Smoke from the Cigar Galaxy lost link
Image
Credit: C. Engelbracht (Steward Obs.), et al. JPL, Caltech, NASA
2004 December 30: M81 and M82: GALEX Full Field
Image
Credit: GALEX Team, Caltech, NASA
2004 June 1: The Supergalactic Wind from Starburst Galaxy M82
Image
Credit: M. Westmoquette (UCL), J. Gallagher (U. Wisconsin-Madison), L. Smith (UCL), WIYN/NSF, HST, NASA/ESA
2000 September 14 M82's Middle Mass Black Hole
Image
Credit: NASA/ CXC/ SAO

Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 6:39 am
by Ann
M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & Copyright: Harshwardhan Pathak


Ah yes, dear old M82 again, the prototypical nearby starburst galaxy! :ssmile:

Like many starburst galaxies, M82 is small.
Wikipedia wrote:

It is the second-largest member of the M81 Group, with the D25 isophotal diameter of 12.52 kiloparsecs (40,800 light-years).
(Yeah, yeah, isophotal diameter - if I understood it correctly, it means the diameter out to the distance from the center where the average B magnitude drops below 25 mags/arcsecond. Never mind!!)

So let's just day diameter. If the diameter of M82 is around 41,000 light-years, then that means that the diameter of M82 is less than half the diameter of the Milky Way, which makes it tiny indeed!

Yes, but despite its small size, M82 is bright! 🎇
Wikipedia wrote:

It is about five times more luminous than the Milky Way and its central region is about one hundred times more luminous.
That little wisp of a thing!!!!

The reason why M82 has such a tremendously bright center is because there is a truly gigantic starburst going on in its center.

(I hate those old Hubble images that came with huge white borders on each side... anyway...)

Wikipedia wrote:

In 2005, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed 197 young massive clusters in the starburst core.[7] The average mass of these clusters is around 200,000 solar masses, hence the starburst core is a very energetic and high-density environment.[7] Throughout the galaxy's center, young stars are being born 10 times faster than they are inside the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
STScI-01EVT9Q4PSB3W6P5ZCGJA38GQT[1].jpg
M82 photographed without an Hα filter.
Credit: N.A. Sharp/AURA/NOAO/NSF

I had to post the picture by N.A. Sharp/AURA/NOAO/NSF as an attachment, because it is so large! It's almost a megabyte in size, can you believe it? And there are white borders attached to it, too. Sigh.

Anyway. I wanted to point out that the ionized gas flowing out of M82 is not all that very visible if you don't photograph M82 with an Hα filter. But all the dust is very visible!

Because of the violent outflow of gas from the center of M82, and because of all the dust that is created because of it it, the disk of M82 is weird. It is very dusty, but it has no "normal" dust lanes. The violent gaseous outflow from the center appears to play havoc with the disk, so that the disk appears to lack spiral arms and star formation. (Although, as Wikipedia tells us, M82 does have a pair of spiral arms that are visible in infrared light.)

When I look at M82, I get the impression of a galaxy lighting up its center so brilliantly that it is turning itself inside out, violently ejecting all its starforming material, forming a great red bipolar gas plume over its center and a leaving a chaotic mess of dust lanes over a barren disk.

Ann

Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 1:06 pm
by Chris Peterson
Ann wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 6:39 am
Ah yes, dear old M82 again, the prototypical nearby starburst galaxy! :ssmile:

Like many starburst galaxies, M82 is small.
Wikipedia wrote:

It is the second-largest member of the M81 Group, with the D25 isophotal diameter of 12.52 kiloparsecs (40,800 light-years).
(Yeah, yeah, isophotal diameter - if I understood it correctly, it means the diameter out to the distance from the center where the average B magnitude drops below 25 mags/arcsecond. Never mind!!)

So let's just day diameter. If the diameter of M82 is around 41,000 light-years, then that means that the diameter of M82 is less than half the diameter of the Milky Way, which makes it tiny indeed!
Hmm. The Milky Way is a very large galaxy. I'd not characterize a galaxy half its size as "tiny". M82 seems quite typical in terms of galaxy size. Tiny galaxies are perhaps 5% of the size of the MW, not 50%!

Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 2:52 pm
by sp0ck
You missed 2012 MAR 26 :D
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120326.html

AVAO wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 5:28 am APOD Gallery

2023 August 2: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind
Image
NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & Copyright: Harshwardhan Pathak
Filters: Infrared I (814 nm), Optical V (555 nm), Optical B (435 nm), Optical H- Alpha( 658 nm)
Processing software: FITS Liberator, Pixinsight and Adobe Photoshop


2023 January 20: Galaxy Wars: M81 and M82 viewtopic.php?t=42891
Image
Image Credit & Copyright: Andreas Aufschnaiter
2020 May 15: Galaxy Wars: M81 and M82 viewtopic.php?t=40564
Image
Image Credit & Copyright: Dietmar Hager, Torsten Grossmann
2017 June 27: The M81 Galaxy Group through the Integrated Flux Nebula viewtopic.php?t=37327
Image
Image Credit & Copyright : D. Lopez & A. Rosenberg, IAC
2016 February 3: Galaxy Wars: M81 versus M82 viewtopic.php?t=35615
Image
Image Credit & Copyright: Andr? van der Hoeven, Neil Fleming & Michael Van Doorn
2014 August 16 No X-rays from SN 2014J viewtopic.php?t=33763
Image
Image Credit: NASA / CXC / SAO / R. Margutti et al.
2013 September 25: M81 versus M82 viewtopic.php?t=32195
Image
Image Credit & Copyright: Ivan Eder
2013 July 4: M82: Starburst Galaxy with a Superwind lost link
Image
Image Credit & Copyright: Ken Crawford (Rancho Del Sol Obs.)
2010 December 19: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind lost link
Image
Credit: NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team, (STScI / AURA) Acknowledgement: M. Mountain (STScI), P. Puxley (NSF), J. Gallagher (U. Wisconsin)
2006 April 14 Smoke from the Cigar Galaxy lost link
Image
Credit: C. Engelbracht (Steward Obs.), et al. JPL, Caltech, NASA
2004 December 30: M81 and M82: GALEX Full Field
Image
Credit: GALEX Team, Caltech, NASA
2004 June 1: The Supergalactic Wind from Starburst Galaxy M82
Image
Credit: M. Westmoquette (UCL), J. Gallagher (U. Wisconsin-Madison), L. Smith (UCL), WIYN/NSF, HST, NASA/ESA
2000 September 14 M82's Middle Mass Black Hole
Image
Credit: NASA/ CXC/ SAO

Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 3:39 pm
by Ann
Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 1:06 pm
Ann wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 6:39 am
Ah yes, dear old M82 again, the prototypical nearby starburst galaxy! :ssmile:

Like many starburst galaxies, M82 is small.
Wikipedia wrote:

It is the second-largest member of the M81 Group, with the D25 isophotal diameter of 12.52 kiloparsecs (40,800 light-years).
(Yeah, yeah, isophotal diameter - if I understood it correctly, it means the diameter out to the distance from the center where the average B magnitude drops below 25 mags/arcsecond. Never mind!!)

So let's just day diameter. If the diameter of M82 is around 41,000 light-years, then that means that the diameter of M82 is less than half the diameter of the Milky Way, which makes it tiny indeed!
Hmm. The Milky Way is a very large galaxy. I'd not characterize a galaxy half its size as "tiny". M82 seems quite typical in terms of galaxy size. Tiny galaxies are perhaps 5% of the size of the MW, not 50%!
Hmm right back at you! Straining my math skills to their limits (i.e., asking Google), I "calculated" that the "surface area" of the Milky Way is some five times the "surface area" of M82. But if M82 is "five times smaller" than our own galaxy, it is also five times brighter! Well, disregarding its center, which is a hundred times brighter than the center of the Milky Way, according to Wikipedia! :shock:

(And speaking about averages, I can't resist this. You've heard, haven't you, that our Sun is so so average among stars? Well, it's not! It's big and massive compared with the vast majority of stars in our galaxy! So we live in a big galaxy, orbit a big star, and live on a planet that is the biggest rocky body in the Solar system. Admittedly our galaxy seems to be full of "super-Earths", rocky bodies considerably larger than the Earth, so I guess we shouldn't brag about the size and mass of our planet.) :wink:

Ann

Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 4:16 pm
by AVAO
sp0ck wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 2:52 pm You missed 2012 MAR 26 :D
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120326.html
AVAO wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 5:28 am APOD Gallery

2023 August 2: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & Copyright: Harshwardhan Pathak
Filters: Infrared I (814 nm), Optical V (555 nm), Optical B (435 nm), Optical H- Alpha( 658 nm)
Processing software: FITS Liberator, Pixinsight and Adobe Photoshop


2010 December 19: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind lost link Credit: NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team, (STScI / AURA) Acknowledgement: M. Mountain (STScI), P. Puxley (NSF), J. Gallagher (U. Wisconsin)
That's correct. The 2012 MAR 26 APOD is a replication of the 2010 December 19 APOD :ssmile:

(...by the way, if I compare the original NASA processing used there with today's APOD, I notice that in today's APOD the center is completely white (phototechnically "burned out"), the star fields appear ultra blue and the brown dust cloud areas appear orange, which typically happens when during the Photoshop finishing contrast and color dynamics are "pimped up" by more than 50%. The fact that the foreground star has more than four spikes suggests that other image material was used, although I assume that this still comes from Hubble, but was taken at a different time...)

Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 6:49 pm
by orin stepanek
M82_HubblePathak_1080.jpg
My Opinion> The wind takes away the beauty of this galaxy.
M82 very nice looking! 8-)

Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 8:41 pm
by johnnydeep
orin stepanek wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 6:49 pm M82_HubblePathak_1080.jpg
My Opinion> The wind takes away the beauty of this galaxy.
M82 very nice looking! 8-)
I think it makes it look nicer. Do you find the one below to be better looking or worse?

Click to view full size image

And how about this one:

Click to view full size image

Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 9:59 pm
by orin stepanek
m81-82_flux_eder1024.jpg
M82 a definite beauty; I like to think MW looks a lot like this! :mrgreen:

Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2023 3:22 pm
by johnnydeep
orin stepanek wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 9:59 pm m81-82_flux_eder1024.jpg
M82 a definite beauty; I like to think MW looks a lot like this! :mrgreen:
That's M81 you're admiring and comparing to the MW.

Re: APOD: M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind (2023 Aug 02)

Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2023 8:01 pm
by orin stepanek
johnnydeep wrote: ↑Thu Aug 03, 2023 3:22 pm
orin stepanek wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 9:59 pm m81-82_flux_eder1024.jpg
M82 a definite beauty; I like to think MW looks a lot like this! :mrgreen:
That's M81 you're admiring and comparing to the MW.
oops :oops:! Forgive me!