Hubble Telescope celebrates anniversary
On the sixteenth anniversary of its space career, the Hubble telescope presents a pretty birthday photo - the close-up of spiral galaxy M82, composed of six different wavelength exposures. Hubble's latest model, shot in March, the "Cigar Galaxy" lies about 12 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major.
M82 was captured sharper than ever from wide-angle, Nasa and Esa proudly announce, with the galaxy's characteristically cigar-shaped, bright blue disk clearly standing out. It is surrounded by glowing red-orange wisps of hydrogen cloud emanating from the galactic center. Stars form there almost ten times faster than in the heart of the Milky Way. At the current rate, M82 can be expected to lose stellar replenishment in a few tens of millions of years.
Only in the new Hubble images do the galaxy's formative, clumped star-forming regions also become apparent - here young stars are tightly united in bright clusters that dot the image as faintly whitish specks around the galaxy. What looks like diffuse stars here are actually clusters of up to a million suns about twenty light years across.
