 Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day podcast. Today's picture for April 15th of 2024 is titled The Cigar Galaxy from Hubble and Web. So what do we see here? Well here we see two pictures of what is known as the Cigar Galaxy, also known as M82 and this is an example of what is called a Starburst Galaxy undergoing a burst of star formation. Now that's likely caused by interactions with another galaxy nearby and as galaxies pass near one another that affects their gravitation and can cause star clouds and gas clouds to collide and those gas clouds will then begin forming new stars. Now on the left we see the wider field view from the Hubble Space Telescope looking at this and the inset image is zooming in and looking at far more detail at the center from the James Webb Space Telescope and it's hopefully telling us a little bit more about this galaxy and what is going on and as we often find getting more detail sometimes raises more questions than it actually solves so here we see a lot of this red dust being associated with a hot plasma so it's a little different than what might have been thought before so what is going on here and that's a really good question and not something that we fully understand. We have some good ideas as to what goes on with these galaxies but a lot of things in terms of this type of interaction is not something that we can certainly simulate in a lab here on Earth so astronomy is a little different than other sciences where we can't bring things into the laboratory or simulate them now we can do simulations on the computers to be able to try to understand these and of course those require simplifications they require making models of what is happening in the galaxy. A model is by its nature a simplification of what is what we see in that galaxy so it's not going to be exact but it's generally can at least give us some kind of understanding there. So here future models and future observations can help us to better understand what is going on in a galaxy like this and in this starburst galaxy caused by interactions with other galaxies nearby what is really going on at the core and future images from web studying this galaxy and other similar galaxies could lead to a much better understanding of what goes on at the central regions of these interacting galaxies and give us that better understanding of what is going on in this process now all galaxies interact including our own so this is a stage that galaxies will go through in general so it is something we would love to be able to better understand so that was our picture of the day for April 15th of 2024 it was titled the cigar galaxy from Hubble and Webb we'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture previewed to be hot star mess so we'll see what that is about tomorrow and until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class