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Galaxy Messier 81 is a spiral galaxy, much like our very own Milky Way, located 11.6 million light years away. The Hubble Space Telescope of NASA recently took high resolution image captures of M81. And through a series of collaborating space observatories around the globe, they were able to collect new information regarding the mysterious galaxy not very dissimilar from our own.
"The view we have of M81 is similar to what an astronomer in Andromeda would see if they looked at the Milky Way," explained Andreas Zezas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It's also surprising that the Hubble, named after Edwin Hubble who first discerned that the stars in Andromeda marked the galaxy distinct from our own, repeated such a feat 80 years after, with a galaxy five times farther away.
If fact, NASA pegs M81 as one of the brightest galaxies that can be viewed from Earth. With a penchant for discerning colors and lights, star gazers could find the Milky Way look-alike high up in the northern sky close to the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It's obliquely angled to the Milky Way, so much of the galaxy is viewable.
The image that you see above was presented at a press conference held at the 210th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The photo has been regarded as one of the sharpest ever taken of M81. "We can see individual stars like tiny grains of sand," said Zezas, showing how intricately detailed the photo was.
Two other images were presented, after a collaboration of data gathered from Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer missions joined with the Hubble Space Telescope data. NASA believes that the galaxy developed through an "episode of star formation" dating back 600 million years ago.
"The presence of dust lanes shows that star formation is happening all the way down to the nucleus," Zezas pointed out. The outer parts of the spiral arms also depict numerous blue-white hot stars, while everything from global clusters to forming dust clouds can be seen clearly in the picture.
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