A WISE view of two very different galaxies

[astroron]

A very interesting and different view of galaxies M81 and M82.
I look forward to the release of new images later on this year from this telescope:thumbsup:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-016&cid=release_2011-016
Cheers

[renormalised]

A very WISE shot :)

[CraigS]

Quite extraordinary isn't it Ron ? … All courtesy of WISE … a mere 16 inch infrared telescope ! (Well .. I guess it IS in orbit .. which makes a bit of a difference ;) )

Both in the same shot ... both colliding and showing different effects from the same collision .. M81 develops the classic spiral shape and M82 gets massive starbursts. Goodness knows what's going on in the cores as a result !

The other day I read that they discovered, in M87, the most massive black hole in the nearby universe at 6.6 billion times the mass of the Sun !!! (The Milky Way SMBH is 4 million solar masses, and this one is 1600 times more massive !!!!). They measured this by observing the speeds of the stars in the center of the galaxy as they orbit the black hole. In this case, they used the Gemini 'telescope' (… two 27 foot Cass reflectors … one in Hawaii, One in Chile !!).

The technology is what has given us all this !

Who would've thought about all this thirty or so years ago ??
(Well .. I guess at least one person did ! ;) )

:)

Cheers

[renormalised]

The core of M81 isn't all that active....actually the amount of activity that the encounter between the two galaxies produced in M81 was only fairly moderate. M82 was always a gassier and dustier galaxy. Also, much smaller. It was the one that got stirred up the most.

The reason why the BH in M87 grew to its size is because M87 is made up of dozens of merged galaxies.