When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.The cool wind of galaxy M82 drives gas and dust up to 40,000 light-years from its core, as shown here using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. The inset shows a Chandra view of the galaxy’s central region, where a cauldron of stellar activity kick-starts the larger-scale outflow. | Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; X-ray: NASA/CXC/JHU/D.Strickland; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA/The Hubble Heritage Team; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of AZ/C. Engelbracht; XRISM Collaboration et al. 2026NASA’s X-ray spacecraft XRISM, which stands for X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, has clocked how fast winds are ripping from a distant galaxy bursting with star formation.It would appear these winds travel at an incredible 2 million miles per hour (3.21 million kilometers per hour).The superheated gas from this galaxy, Messier 82 (M82), flows from a region of intense stellar activity at the galaxy’s heart. M82 is located around 12 million light-years away from us in the northern constellation Ursa Major and classified as a “starburst galaxy” because it is forming stars 10 times as rapidly as the Milky Way does.AdvertisementAdvertisement”The classic model of starburst galaxies like M82 suggests that shock waves from star formation and supernovas near the center heat gas, kick-starting a powerful wind,” team member Erin Boettcher, of the University of Maryland, College Park, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. “Prior to XRISM, though, we didn’t have the ability to measure the velocities needed to test that hypothesis. Now we see the gas moving even faster than some models predict, more than enough to drive the wind all the way to the edge of the galaxy.”Boettcher measured the speed of these galactic winds using the XRISM (pronounced “crism”) spacecraft’s Resolve instrument.Cigar galaxy has smoking hot windsAlso known as the Cigar Galaxy, M82 is known for its cool winds composed of vast amounts of gas and dust that stretch out for around 40,000 light-years. These winds have been observed with a wealth of space telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Chandra a …
