Chandra Images Torrent of Star Formation

[n2doc]

A new Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Messier 82, or M82, shows the result of star formation on overdrive. M82 is located about 12 million light years from Earth and is the nearest place to us where the conditions are similar to those when the Universe was much younger with lots of stars forming.

M82 is a so-called starburst galaxy, where stars are forming at rates that are tens or even hundreds of times higher than in a normal galaxy. The burst of star birth may be caused by a close encounter or collision with another galaxy, which sends shock waves rushing through the galaxy. In the case of M82, astronomers think that a brush with its neighbor galaxy M81 millions of years ago set off this torrent of star formation.

M82 is seen nearly edge-on with its disk crossing from about 10 o'clock to about 4 o'clock in this image from Chandra (where low, medium, and high-energy X-rays are colored red, green, and blue respectively.) Among the 104 point-like X-ray sources in the image, eight so far have been observed to be very bright in X-rays and undergo clear changes in brightness over periods of weeks and years. This means they are excellent candidates to be black holes pulling material from companion stars that are much more massive than the Sun. Only a handful of such binary systems are known in the Local Group of galaxies containing the Milky Way and M31.

Chandra observations are also important in understanding the rapid rate at which supernovas explode in starburst galaxies like M82. When the shock waves travel through the galaxy, they push on giant clouds of gas and dust, which causes them to collapse and form massive stars. These stars, in turn, use up their fuel quickly and explode as supernovas. These supernovas produce expanding bubbles of multimillion-degree gas that extend for millions light years away from the galaxy's disk. These bubbles are seen as the large red areas to the upper right and lower left of the image.
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http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2011/m82/

[Peace Patriot]

1. Totally awesome! It looks like it's dispersing but it's actually creating stars.

I wonder what this object looks like now--12 million years later. I might have guessed that its material would be long gone, scattered into space. But we can't see dark matter, black holes, shock waves and gravity, which will, instead, twirl it around itself creating one or several organized objects with neat, graceful spiral arms where the stars cool down and life can develop.

I've been looking at a whole lot of Sloan and Hubble objects over the last two years, at the Galaxy Zoo projects (highly recommended) and it sure becomes obvious after a while that, although most of the time, matter is burning at unimaginable temperatures and is magnificently exploding in spectacular displays, it has an inherent tendency to organize and to produce a specific kind of structure--spinning spirals. Even the most primitive objects in the Hubble photos tend to wiggle into an "S" shape. Why, I haven't a clue. That is the paradigm of the universe. And, so far as we know, only this shape can produce conscious life.