Rainbow Mist

Credit: NASA & ESA

Using dif­fer­ent wave­lengths of light, sci­en­tists more eas­ily explore the nearby star­burst galaxy M82. Sci­en­tists com­bined light from the Chan­dra X-ray Obser­va­tory, Hub­ble Space Tele­scope and the Spitzer Space Tele­scope for this view and have found evi­dence for two black holes at the cen­ter of this active galaxy.

Credit: NASA & ESA

The two bright X-ray sources, shown in the zoom above, may be intermediate-mass black holes. They might be the seeds required for the growth of super­mas­sive black holes usu­ally found in the cen­ter of galax­ies. One of the pos­si­ble black holes, called X42.3+59 is about 290 light-years from the cen­ter of M82. This black hole has the same mass as 12,000 to 43,000 of our Suns. The other black hole is much smaller weigh­ing about the same as 200 to 800 of our Suns. This black hole is about 600 light-years from the cen­ter of M82.

Explore the star­burst galaxy M82. The Chan­dra image shows in blue. Opti­cal imagery from the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope shows in green an orange while the infrared image from Spitzer shows as red. M82 is located about 12 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion of Ursa Major, the Big Bear or Big Dip­per. Many stars are form­ing all at once within this odd galaxy. While M82 may be much more active than our Milky Way Galaxy, it is also much smaller with a diam­e­ter of only about 6,300 light-years. Light takes more than 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way Galaxy.