Cigar Galaxy
What is Cigar Galaxy?
Galaxies· Distance ~12 million ly. An edge-on galaxy shaped like a cigar. A brush with neighbouring M81 set off a frenzy of star birth at its core, and the energy blasts hot gas tens of thousands of light-years above and below the disc — the nearest example of a starburst galaxy.
📍 Visible from where you are right now — computed in your browser
bearing · altitude · rise time · best time tonight
Where Cigar Galaxy is in your sky right now: https://nowsky.org/solar/sky?sel=m82 — location and time set automatically, no login.
Distance and scale
| Distance | ~12 million ly |
|---|---|
| Diameter | ~37,000 ly |
| Star formation | ~10× the Milky Way's |
| Constellation | Ursa Major |
Figures are representative approximations. Source: compiled from NASA and IAU public data.
Frequently asked
- How far is Cigar Galaxy from Earth?
- ~12 million ly.
- How big is Cigar Galaxy?
- ~37,000 ly.
- In one line, what is Cigar Galaxy?
- Galaxies — An edge-on galaxy shaped like a cigar.
- Where is Cigar Galaxy in the sky right now?
- Open the sky view for your location and time and it shows the position in the sky right now.
SN 2014J, the nearest Type Ia supernova in decades
On 21 January 2014 students in a teaching session at a London university discovered a supernova in M82 — a new star appeared in an image their instructor took while demonstrating the telescope. SN 2014J was a Type Ia, the explosion of a white dwarf, and at 12 million light-years the nearest Type Ia since 1972. It brightened to 11th magnitude, visible in binoculars, and gave a chance to test up close the "standard candles" used to measure cosmic expansion.
Being so near, there were pre-explosion data too. Earlier Hubble and Chandra observations showed nothing at the site, narrowing the exploded white dwarf's companion to another white dwarf or a very small star rather than a giant. Whether Type Ia explosions come from two merging white dwarfs or from a white dwarf fed by a companion bears directly on the errors of cosmology, and 2014J is still cited as the closest piece of evidence in that debate.
The galaxy in depth
The Cigar Galaxy, M82, sits right beside Bode's Galaxy M81, about 12 million light-years away. Seen nearly edge-on it looks like a slender cigar, and at roughly 37,000 light-years across it is about a third the Milky Way's size. Small as it is, the central few thousand light-years are forging stars ten times faster than our entire galaxy — the textbook starburst galaxy.
The frenzy is traced to a close pass by M81 a few hundred million years ago that funnelled gas into the core. The massive stars born there explode one after another as supernovae, driving hot gas and dust straight out of the disc; the red plumes of hydrogen in Hubble's images are that 'superwind'. In 2014 the Type Ia supernova 2014J erupted here, the closest of its kind in decades.
It lies north-west of Dubhe, a full-moon width from M81. Select M82 in the Sky view to mark it; in real skies binoculars catch it as a streak of light beside M81's round glow, and a medium telescope reveals the dark dust bands slashing across the cigar.
Related
Figures are representative approximations. Simulated positions use J2000 mean elements.