Bode’s and Cigar Galaxies

M81 and M82 | Ursa Major | 9h 55’ 26”, 69° 24’ 55”

One of the most striking galaxy pairs in the northern sky. M81 (Bode's Galaxy) is a grand design spiral about 12 million light-years away in Ursa Major — close enough that individual star-forming regions are visible in the spiral arms. Its companion M82 (the Cigar Galaxy) is an edge-on starburst galaxy whose core has been violently disrupted by gravitational interaction with M81. The red filaments streaming above and below M82's disk are enormous outflows of hydrogen gas, driven by intense star formation at its centre.

The two galaxies have been interacting for hundreds of millions of years. That interaction compressed gas in M82's core, triggering a burst of new star formation roughly ten times more intense than in a typical galaxy.