Webb spent three days photographing one beautiful galactic mess

The Cigar Galaxy is a cosmic mess: warped, dusty, furiously making stars, and apparently photogenic enough that Webb stared at it for nearly three days and produced a 223-megapixel glamour shot.

The new image combines Webb's ability to peer through dust with Hubble's view of glowing gas and dusty structure. The result is less "space photo" than "cosmic autopsy of a beautiful disaster": millions of individual stars, red-orange dust grains, yellow ionized hydrogen, and a galaxy busily making more stars than is probably good for it.

A team of astronomers recently completed an imaging survey with the Webb telescope. This program entailed a total of 65 hours of observation time with Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument and revealed never-seen-before details of the starburst galaxy, including its distended disk structure and millions of individual stars. Webb's high-resolution imaging, specifically of the main plane of the galactic disk, has unlocked vital information for astronomers as they seek to uncover M82's formation history. Additionally, the Webb data will help scientists understand the current processes occurring within the starburst galaxy.

"M82 is a mess, but it's a beautiful mess. 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?" said principal investigator Adam Smercina, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and incoming Assistant Professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts. "M82 is an ideal galaxy evolution laboratory because it has properties that allow us to probe important physical processes, such as how stars form in such environments and how that activity drives outflows. M82 provides a simultaneous window onto many astrophysical questions, in a way that no other galaxy in the local universe can."

Space remains the undefeated champion of making human problems look like sand on a beach.

h/t Petapixel

Previously:
• Incredible images of NASA spacecraft's arrival at asteroid this morning
• NASA's spectacular new 1.8 billion pixel panorama photo from Mars
• NASA InSight robot lander's amazing first images from Mars
• NASA's 'Top 20 Earth Images of 2020'