🌌 Galaxy
Cigar Galaxy
A galaxy making new stars ten times faster than the whole Milky Way.
- Distance
- 12 million light-years away
- Discovered
- 1774, by Johann Elert Bode
Did you know?
- It is also called M82. The pull of its bigger neighbour, M81, has set off a burst of star birth near its middle.
- Winds from all those young stars blow gas out of it, glowing red in pictures.
- It lies in Ursa Major, the Great Bear.
Find it in the sky
More NASA photos of Cigar GalaxyStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of deep space
The Sun
Our star, an ordinary one that keeps everything here alive.
Betelgeuse
A red supergiant in Orion that will one day explode.
Alpha Centauri
The closest star system to the Sun.
Eta Carinae
A pair of giant stars, one of them about 90 times heavier than the Sun.
Mira
A red giant star racing through space with a tail like a comet.
Zeta Ophiuchi
A runaway star, flung out when its partner exploded.