NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is back with another stunner: a new 223-megapixel composite featuring about 16.5 million stars that have been evolving over several million years. Captured by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) across 65 hours, the enormous image features Messier 82, also known as the Cigar galaxy, which is located 12 million light-years away.
“M82 is a mess, but it’s a beautiful mess,” said NASA fellow Adam Smercina. “We don’t fully understand what’s going on, especially concerning its evolutionary history. What could have triggered such an elevated rate of star formation? How long has this galaxy been driving plumes of material away from its center?”
Initial speculation includes a galaxy merger causing rapid star formation 10 times faster than that of the Milky Way and lasting a few hundred million years, which researchers describe as “a short-lived event in astronomical terms.” Although we can see many of these stellar objects as blue granules, there are likely many more invisible to us.
Hubble had previously looked at the galaxy, but the technology was unable to capture the same detail as Webb. As shown in a side-by-side comparison, Hubble captures many of the dust grains and ionized hydrogen gas depicted in red, orange, and yellow, while Webb highlights the staggering density of stars.
“Galaxies are such intricate ecosystems that if you truly want to understand them, you have to pull datasets from different missions together,” said Kristen McQuinn, of the Space Telescope Science Institute. “One mission cannot fully answer all of the questions we have about M82. Combining the data collected by different telescopes, like Webb and Hubble, is powerful. When you marry the datasets, you expand what you can probe, and the questions that you can pose are even more complex.”
