It is also called the 'Cigar Galaxy' because of the elliptical shape produced by the oblique tilt of its starry disk relative to our line of sight. 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. The starburst then will subside, probably in a few tens of millions of years. When star formation becomes too vigorous, it will consume or destroy the material needed to make more stars. The rapid rate of star formation in this galaxy eventually will be self-limiting. 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. The clusters in the clumps can only be distinguished in the sharp Hubble images. These, in turn, congregate by the dozens to make the bright patches, or 'starburst clumps,' in the central parts of M82. In M82, young stars are crammed into tiny but massive star clusters. The fierce galactic superwind generated from these stars compresses enough gas to make millions of more stars. The resulting huge concentration of young stars carved into the gas and dust at the galaxy's center. Throughout the galaxy's center, young stars are being born 10 times faster than they are inside our entire Milky Way Galaxy. 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. This mosaic image is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82. To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope's 16 years of success, the two space agencies involved in the project, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), are releasing this image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82).

A path towards the stars wallpaper