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Sunday, May 16, 2010

Messier 82, Cigar Galaxy

A new personal record, 400 frames! The whole lot taken in just under 5 hours during a good night of extended darkness. This galaxy gets its unusual shape from an exceptionally high rate of star formation, a process called starburst [wiki].

To add to this one's mystery, in April of this year, radio astronomers in Manchester reported a strange new object in M82. A 'micro quasar' was suggested, highly luminous and fairly stable. Some associate this with a massive black hole system, but not at the galaxy's center. The object is several arcseconds off center and an apparent motion of 4x the speed of light!

Yes, you read right, FOUR times the speed of light....warp speed, Scotty!

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