NASA’s Webb Pinpoints Millions of Stars Within Cigar Galaxy

M82 Cigar Galaxy (Webb + Hubble)

Scientists used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to image edge-on starburst galaxy Messier 82 and trace its evolutionary history. This Webb and Hubble composite image includes 16.5 million stars (blue-white), dust grains (red-orange), and ionized hydrogen gas (yellow). Credit Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Adam Smercina (STScI, Tufts), Thomas Williams (University of Manchester); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

M82 Cigar Galaxy (NIRCam Image)

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed edge-on starburst galaxy Messier 82, peering through dust to reveal 16.5 million stars and the galaxy’s distended disk structure. Scientists seek to learn the galaxy’s evolutionary history with the Webb data. Credit Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Adam Smercina (STScI, Tufts), Thomas Williams (University of Manchester); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

M82 Cigar Galaxy (Hubble/Webb Side-by-Side)

Side-by-side comparison of a portion of starburst galaxy Messier 82 (M82) as seen by NASA’s Hubble (left) and James Webb (right) space telescopes. Hubble detailed M82’s gas and dust structure, while Webb pierced through the dust and resolved millions of stars in infrared light. Credit Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Adam Smercina (STScI, Tufts), Thomas Williams (University of Manchester); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

M82 Cigar Galaxy (Compass Image)

Annotated image of the starburst galaxy Messier 82 captured by Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument, with compass arrows, a scale bar, and color key for reference. Credit Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Adam Smercina (STScI, Tufts), Thomas Williams (University of Manchester); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

M82 Cigar Galaxy (Webb + Hubble Fade)

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared observation of M82 is the most recent addition to overall data on this starburst galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope is one observatory that has previously looked at M82, detailing the gas and dust structure seen in visible light. Credit Video: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

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Located 12 million light-years away and undergoing rapid star formation, edge-on spiral galaxy Messier 82 (M82) is a scientifically unique sight to behold, and now NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed previously unseen details.

M82’s intense star formation, thought to be the result of a galaxy merger, will be a short-lived event in astronomical terms, estimated to last a few hundred million years in its entirety. This temporary phase of extreme star formation relative to the galaxy’s mass, as well as its location in the local universe, are among the factors that make M82, also known as the Cigar galaxy, a one-of-a-kind environment to study.

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.”

Prior to Webb, many observatories looked at the starburst galaxy, including NASA’s Hubble and retired Spitzer space telescopes. However, the sheer volume of dust within that galaxy limited the amount of information astronomers could acquire on M82 at high resolution. While Webb has previously looked at this galaxy, the duration of the new imaging survey, combined with the telescope’s infrared sensitivity, enabled it to pierce through the thick dust.

The telescope’s near-infrared-light view is a snapshot of a scene that has been evolving over a couple hundred million years. Webb’s image contains approximately 16.5 million individual stars dispersed throughout the galaxy. The light from these stellar sources is depicted as luminous blue granules. This is only a small portion of the total amount of stars astronomers think reside in a galaxy like M82, with the majority too faint to be seen.

“The sheer number of stars that we were able to resolve with Webb is incredible,” said team member Benjamin Williams of the University of Washington. “It’s a whole different world from what we’ve been able to see with other telescopes. All of these stars collectively provide a detailed fossil record of the formation and evolution of M82.”

Moving inward, the increase in brightness and the asymmetrical shape of the galactic disk hints at the spiral galaxy’s unique underlying structure. The differing radii between the two sides suggests that M82 has a distorted shape, which can happen during intense galaxy mergers.

“At first glance, the disk of the galaxy may seem less spectacular because Webb sees through the dust,” said team member Eric Bell of the University of Michigan. “But M82 is a delightfully complex system. Webb’s observations will help us address some ongoing mysteries, such as how star formation has moved within M82 over the last few billion years.”

Because of the extreme star formation within the galaxy, which is 10 times faster than the Milky Way galaxy’s star formation rate, stellar birth will eventually be disrupted. M82’s stellar frenzy is causing bipolar plumes of material to be ejected above and below the disk. Though it looks like a tumultuous region, the hourglass-shaped outflows appear to have a layered structure. The yellow tendrils of material closest to the galaxy’s disk represent ionized gas, whereas the orange material farther away depicts small dust grains. These grains are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and are helpful in tracing material in the space between the galaxy’s stars, also known as the interstellar medium.

The information collected as part of this Webb study is just one dataset scientists will analyze as they seek to piece together this starburst galaxy’s formation history.

“Galaxies are such intricate ecosystems that if you truly want to understand them, you have to pull datasets from different missions together,” said team member 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.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

Source: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope/Latest News

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Details:

Last Updated: Jun 23, 2026
Location: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Contact Media:

Laura Betz
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
laura.e.betz@nasa.gov

Abigail Major
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland

Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland

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Particle Physics in Space: In Search of the Elusive Axion

Composite image of the Sun including high-energy X-ray data from NuSTAR (blue); low-energy X-ray data from Hinode (green); and ultraviolet data from Solar Dynamics Observatory (red). The centers of stars like or even bigger than our Sun are unimaginably hot environments that may hold the key to detecting dark matter. Download Image

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NuSTAR is best known for observing some of the hottest, brightest, and most extreme phenomena in the Universe, such as supernovae explosions and the immediate surroundings of black holes. But did you know that it can also be used to search for some of the smallest and most elusive particles in existence?

For decades we've known that a large portion of the mass in the Universe—even more than all the stars and galaxies that we can see—consists of dark matter. We know it's there because we can see its gravitational effects on the matter we can observe—just like we can't see air but can see its effect on the world around us when trees sway in the wind. But dark matter itself, like its name suggests, is invisible to us, as it does not give off or interact with light. This makes trying to find out what it's actually made of incredibly difficult.

Axions

Many different kinds of particles and objects have been put forward as possible candidates to be dark matter, one of which is the axion. If you think that sounds a bit like the name of a cleaning product, you'd be right—it was named after a laundry detergent brand because it 'cleans up' a messy problem in particle physics called charge-parity violation. Under the Standard Model of particle physics, the laws of physics apply in the same way to particles and their corresponding anti-particles. But if this were the case, why is there so much more matter in the Universe than anti-matter? Axions present a possible solution to this problem and would emerge naturally from the breaking of this matter/anti-matter symmetry.

If axions were to exist, they would be extremely light and interact so weakly with normal matter that trillions could pass through you every second and you wouldn't even notice. This also makes them a compelling candidate for dark matter. However, if we are to demonstrate that this theorized particle exists, first we need to detect it. And that's no small feat, since there is a wide range of possible masses and degrees to which they interact with light or matter that could apply to an axion—in other words, they might be out there but we're not exactly sure what they look like. Axions are so elusive that all ground-based efforts to date have failed to detect them. So, scientists have turned to space to continue the search.

The Sun as a Particle Physics Laboratory

Inside our own Sun, high-energy X-ray photons released in the thermonuclear core face a long, slow journey to the surface, repeatedly absorbed and re-emitted by the densely packed matter inside, losing energy along the way until they finally emerge as visible light thousands to millions of years later. However, the interaction of a high-energy photon with the electric fields of an atomic nucleus or electron could also generate an axion, which then streams directly out of the Sun. Once outside, the axion interacts again with the Sun's magnetic field and can turn back into a photon. Depending on the properties of the axion, this could be an X-ray photon.

This is where NuSTAR comes in. Unlike most sensitive X-ray astrophysics observatories, NuSTAR is able to safely look at the Sun, making it useful for studying flares and hotspots on the Sun's surface. Scientists can also use this Solar data to look for the distinct predicted signatures of axions.

So far, NuSTAR has not detected an axion signal from the Sun. In science, a non-detection is not bad news! Since we know a lot about the Sun's properties, we know that if axions were larger or more interactive than certain values, we would have detected them. The fact that we haven't allows us to rule out certain possibilities for those properties. If axions exist, they must be sufficiently light and non-interactive that the signal from the Sun is too weak to detect.

The next step is to find somewhere that might produce a stronger axion signal than the Sun. Axion emission is directly related to the temperature inside a star. In other words, we're going to need a bigger, hotter star.

Let's go bigger!

On the left shoulder of Orion is an enormous red supergiant star called Betelgeuse, the tenth-brightest star in our night sky. Hundreds of times larger than the Sun, its radius would engulf the orbit of Mars if it were in our Solar system. The temperature of its core is also far higher than the Sun's, implying that it could be a far more efficient source of axions. In 2019, NuSTAR observed Betelgeuse in search of signs of a specific theorized axion production mechanism that Betelgeuse is hot enough to achieve—the de-excitation of iron nuclei. This kind of atomic transition happens at a very specific energy, meaning that the axion-to-photon transformations in the Sun’s outer magnetic field would result in a distinctive X-ray emission line at 14.4 keV.

While the 14.4 keV line was not detected from Betelgeuse, this doesn’t imply that axions cannot exist. Once more, the lack of a signal instead rules out certain possible properties of axions, providing orders of magnitude better constraints on their mass and the strength of their interactions with normal matter than we could achieve with the Sun.

Since axions weren't detected from Betelgeuse, can we find an even bigger, hotter laboratory than that? What if we didn't just look at one star, but a whole galaxy of hot massive stars?

M82, also known as the Cigar Galaxy for its narrow, edge-on shape, is a nearby galaxy undergoing intense star formation, meaning that it is full of newly formed, very massive and very hot stars. If each of these stars could potentially be giving off a very faint axion signal, then by observing the galaxy NuSTAR could pick up their combined signal. This would appear as a high-energy X-ray glow around the galaxy.

"By analyzing over a million seconds of NuSTAR X-ray observations of M82, we found no excess X-ray signal attributable to decaying axions," said Francisco Rodríguez Candón, PhD student at the University of Zaragoza in Spain and the first author of a paper on this new approach. "This null result enabled us to set some of the strictest limits to date on axion properties."

Once more, no signal was detected—which means that we can rule out further swaths of possible combinations of axion mass and photon coupling from the potential axion parameter space. Little by little, we are narrowing down the possibilities and, if axions are truly what makes up dark matter, closing in on their nature.

In the meantime, the search for axion signals continues. These studies demonstrate the importance of using astronomical observations with X-ray telescopes to probe particle physics in environments and on scales that would be impossible to replicate on Earth. With the help of telescopes like NuSTAR, the Universe itself is our particle physics laboratory.

Source: NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR)/News Release

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Magnetic ‘Highway’ Channels Material Out of Cigar Galaxy

Magnetic fields in Messier 82, or the Cigar galaxy, are shown as lines over a visible light and infrared composite image of the galaxy from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Stellar winds streaming from hot new stars form a galactic super wind that is blasting out plumes of hot gas (red) and a huge halo of smoky dust (yellow/orange) perpendicular to the narrow galaxy (white). Researchers used the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy magnetic field data and tools that have been used extensively to study the physics around the Sun to extrapolate the magnetic field’s strength 20,000 lights-years around the galaxy. They appear to extend indefinitely into intergalactic space, like the Sun’s solar wind, and may help explain how the gas and dust have traveled so far away from the galaxy.  Credits: NASA, SOFIA, L. Proudfit; NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team; NASA, JPL-Caltech, C. Engelbracht. Hi-res image

 

What’s fueling the massive ejection of gas and dust out of the Cigar galaxy, otherwise known as Messier 82?

We know that thousands of stars bursting into existence are driving a powerful super-wind that’s blowing matter into intergalactic space. New research shows that magnetic fields are also contributing to the expulsion of material from Messier 82, a well-known example of a starburst galaxy with a distinctive, elongated shape.

The findings from NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, help explain how dust and gas can move from inside galaxies into intergalactic space, offering clues to how galaxies formed. This material is enriched with elements like carbon and oxygen that support life and are the building blocks for future galaxies and stars. The research was presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

SOFIA, a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center, DLR, previously studied the direction of magnetic fields close to the core of Messier 82, as the Cigar galaxy is officially known. This time the team applied tools that have been used extensively to study the physics around the Sun, known as heliophysics, to understand the magnetic field’s strength surrounding the galaxy at a distance 10 times larger than before.

“This is old physics for studying the Sun, but new for galaxies,” said Joan Schmelz, an associate director at the Universities Space Research Association based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and co-author of the upcoming paper about this research. “It’s helping us understand how the space between stars and galaxies became so rich with matter for future cosmic generations.”

Located 12 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major, the Cigar galaxy is undergoing an exceptionally high rate of star formation called a starburst. The star formation is so intense that it creates a “super wind” that blows material out of the galaxy. As SOFIA previously found using the instrumented called the High-Resolution Airborne Wideband Camera, or HAWC+, the wind drags the magnetic field near the galaxy’s core so that it’s perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy across 2,000 light-years.

Researchers wanted to learn if the magnetic field lines would extend indefinitely into intergalactic space like the magnetic environment in the solar wind, or turn over to form structures similar coronal loops that are found in active regions of the Sun. They calculate that the galaxy’s magnetic fields extend out like the solar wind, allowing the material blown by the super wind to escape into intergalactic space.

These extended magnetic fields may help explain how gas and dust spotted by space telescopes have traveled so far away from the galaxy. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope detected dusty material 20,000 lightyears beyond the galaxy, but it was unclear why it had spread so far away from the stars in both directions instead of in a cone-shaped jet.

“The magnetic fields may be acting like a highway, creating lanes for galactic material to spread far and wide into intergalactic space,” said Jordan Guerra Aguilera, a postdoctoral researcher at Villanova University in Pennsylvania and co-author on the upcoming paper.

With rare exceptions, the magnetic field in the solar corona cannot be measured directly. So, about 50 years ago, scientists developed methods to accurately extrapolate magnetic fields from the Sun’s surface into interplanetary space, known in heliophysics as the potential field extrapolation. Using SOFIA’s existing observations of central magnetic fields, the research team modified this method to estimate the magnetic field about 25,000 light-years around the Cigar galaxy.

“We can’t easily measure the magnetic fields at scales this large, but we can extrapolate it with these tools from heliophysics,” said Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez, a Universities Space Research Association scientist for SOFIA based at Ames and lead author on the study. “This new, interdisciplinary method gives us the larger perspective that we need to understand starburst galaxies.”

SOFIA is a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley manages the SOFIA program, science, and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association, headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, and the German SOFIA Institute at the University of Stuttgart. The aircraft is maintained and operated by NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center Building 703, in Palmdale, California. The High-Resolution Airborne Wideband Camera instrument was developed and delivered to NASA by a multi-institution team led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Media Contact: 

Elizabeth Landau 
NASA Headquarters, Washington 
202-358-0845 
elizabeth.r.landau@nasa.gov 

Alison Hawkes 
NASA Ames Research Center, Silicon Valley, Calif. 
650-604-4789 
alison.hawkes@nasa.gov 

Editor: Kassandra Bell

Source: NASA/Galaxies

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Galactic Wind Provides Clues to Evolution of Galaxies

The magnetic field lines of the the Cigar Galaxy (also called M82) appear in this composite image. The lines follow the bipolar outflows (red) generated by exceptionally high rates of star formation. Credit: NASA/SOFIA/E. Lopez-Rodiguez; NASA/Spitzer/J. Moustakas et al.  › Full image and caption

The Cigar Galaxy (also known as M82) is famous for its extraordinary speed in making new stars, with stars being born 10 times faster than in the Milky Way. Now, data from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, have been used to study this galaxy in greater detail, revealing how material that affects the evolution of galaxies may get into intergalactic space.

Researchers found, for the first time, that the galactic wind flowing from the center of the Cigar Galaxy (M82) is aligned along a magnetic field and transports a very large mass of gas and dust - the equivalent mass of 50 million to 60 million Suns. 

"The space between galaxies is not empty," said Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez, a Universities Space Research Association (USRA) scientist working on the SOFIA team. "It contains gas and dust - which are the seed materials for stars and galaxies. Now, we have a better understanding of how this matter escaped from inside galaxies over time." 

Besides being a classic example of a starburst galaxy, which means it is forming an extraordinary number of new stars compared with most other galaxies, M82 also has strong winds blowing gas and dust into intergalactic space. Astronomers have long theorized that these winds would also drag the galaxy's magnetic field in the same direction, but despite numerous studies, there has been no observational proof of the concept.

Researchers using the airborne observatory SOFIA found definitively that the wind from the Cigar Galaxy not only transports a huge amount of gas and dust into the intergalactic medium, but also drags the magnetic field so it is perpendicular to the galactic disc. In fact, the wind drags the magnetic field more than 2,000 light-years across - close to the width of the wind itself.

"One of the main objectives of this research was to evaluate how efficiently the galactic wind can drag along the magnetic field," said Lopez-Rodriguez. "We did not expect to find the magnetic field to be aligned with the wind over such a large area." 

These observations indicate that the powerful winds associated with the starburst phenomenon could be one of the mechanisms responsible for seeding material and injecting a magnetic field into the nearby intergalactic medium. If similar processes took place in the early universe, they would have affected the fundamental evolution of the first galaxies.

The results were published in January 2019 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

SOFIA's newest instrument, the High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera-Plus, or HAWC+, uses far-infrared light to observe celestial dust grains, which align along magnetic field lines. From these results, astronomers can infer the shape and direction of the otherwise invisible magnetic field. Far-infrared light provides key information about magnetic fields because the signal is clean and not contaminated by emission from other physical mechanisms, such as scattered visible light.

"Studying intergalactic magnetic fields - and learning how they evolve - is key to understanding how galaxies evolved over the history of the universe," said Terry Jones, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, and lead researcher for this study. "With SOFIA's HAWC+ instrument, we now have a new perspective on these magnetic fields."

The HAWC+ instrument was developed and delivered to NASA by a multi-institution team led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL scientist and HAWC+ Principal Investigator Darren Dowell, along with JPL scientist Paul Goldsmith, were part of the research team using HAWC+ to study the Cigar Galaxy.

SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, is a Boeing 747SP jetliner modified to carry a 106-inch diameter telescope. It is a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center, DLR. NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley manages the SOFIA program, science and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, and the German SOFIA Institute (DSI) at the University of Stuttgart. The aircraft is maintained and operated from NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center Hangar 703, in Palmdale, California.

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

Written by Kassandra Bell and Arielle Moullet, USRA SOFIA Science Center

Source: JP-Caltech/News

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Smoke Without Fire: a Different View of the Cigar Galaxy

Messier 82
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

This image shows the most detailed view ever of the core of Messier 82 (M 82), also known as the Cigar Galaxy. Rich with dust, young stars and glowing gas, M 82 is both unusually bright and relatively close to Earth. The starburst galaxy is located around 12 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear).

This is not the first time Hubble has imaged the Cigar Galaxy. Previous images (for example heic0604) show a galaxy ablaze with stars. Yet this image looks quite unlike them, and is dominated instead by glowing gas and dust, with the stars almost invisible. Why such a difference?

The new image is more detailed than previous Hubble observations – in fact, it is the most detailed image ever made of this galaxy. But the reason it looks so dramatically different is down to the choices astronomers make when designing their observations. Hubble’s cameras do not see in colour: they are sensitive to a broad range of wavelengths which they image only in greyscale. Colour pictures can be constructed by passing the light through different coloured filters and combining the resulting images, but the choice of filters makes a big difference to the end result.

Using filters which allow through relatively broad bands of colours, similar to those our eyes see, results in natural-looking colours and bright stars, as starlight shines brightly across the spectrum.

Using filters transparent only to the wavelengths emitted by specific chemical elements, as in this image, isolates the light from glowing gas clouds, while blocking out much of the starlight. This explains why the stars appear faint in this image, and why the dust lanes are sharply silhouetted against the brightly glowing gas clouds.

The image shows the light emitted by sulphur (shown in red), visible and ultraviolet light from oxygen (shown green and blue, respectively), and light from hydrogen (cyan).

The field of view is approximately 2.7 by 2.7 arcminutes.

Source: ESA/Hubble - Space Telescope