M82 (Cigar Galaxy) in infrared — JWST's near-infrared view resolves millions of stars in M82's blazing disk and traces the bipolar superwind as glowing tendrils of warm dust erupting above and below the galaxy.

M82 (Cigar Galaxy) in visible — Hubble's 16th-anniversary mosaic shows M82 edge-on: a bright stellar disk laced with dark dust, with crimson hydrogen filaments of the superwind venting from the starburst core.

M82 (Cigar Galaxy) in ultraviolet — Swift's ultraviolet eye picks out the hot, massive young stars packed into M82's starburst — the engine driving the galaxy-scale wind.

M82 (Cigar Galaxy) in xray — Chandra reveals M82's million-degree gas — the diffuse glow of the superwind threading out of the galaxy, studded with bright X-ray binaries and ultraluminous sources.

M82 (Cigar Galaxy) in multi — All three Great Observatories at once: Hubble's starlight and Hα, Spitzer's infrared dust, and Chandra's X-ray superwind combine into the full portrait of a galaxy turning itself inside out.

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Crab Nebula

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M82 (Cigar Galaxy)

The nearest starburst galaxy — an edge-on disk forming stars so furiously that it blasts a bipolar superwind of hot gas thousands of light-years into space.

M82, the Cigar Galaxy, is the closest and best-studied starburst galaxy, about 12 million light-years away in Ursa Major. A close encounter with its giant neighbour M81 funnelled gas into M82's core, igniting a burst of star formation ten times more intense than the entire Milky Way's. The pressure from thousands of supernovae and hot young stars drives a galaxy-scale "superwind" — a bipolar outflow of million-degree gas and dust that erupts perpendicular to the disk. No single telescope captures the whole story: Hubble and JWST trace the dusty disk and the cool tendrils of the wind, Swift catches the ultraviolet glow of the young star clusters powering it, and Chandra reveals the X-ray-hot gas streaming out of the galaxy. Together they show a galaxy in the act of turning itself inside out.