Portal:Astronomy/Picture/17 August 2005

The Cigar Galaxy, also called M82, or NGC 3034, is a starburst galaxy in the Ursa Major constellation, photographed here by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It is debated on whether the galaxy is an irregular galaxy because of its seemingly unorderly structure. or whether its structure is simply concealed to us from massive amounts of dust, and it is really a barred spiral galaxy, with its spiral arms and orderly rows of stars being hidden by large amounts of dust and gravitational distortion.