It has been a very busy week for astronomers, as this year's American Astronomical Society meeting has taken place. New astronomical discoveries started pouring from all over the place, announcing observations of ultramassive black holes, new evidence of dark matter existence, the discovery of a new Einstein double ring, and even the discovery of five new clouds of molecular hydrogen in the near vicinity of the M81 galaxy.

The discovery of the previously undetected masses of gas was made with the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, in the proximity of the M81 and M81 galaxies, and can be viewed showing in red in the attached picture. A similar detection has been made earlier, by ESA's Very Large Array, visible in green light in the same image.

M81, commonly known as Bode's Galaxy, represents a spiral galaxy lying about 12 million light years away from our own. Due to its large scale, close proximity to Earth and the nearly perfect spiraling arms near its center, NGC 3031 as it is catalogued represents one of the most popular galaxies, for study in professional astronomy research.

The M82 galaxy is just one of the galaxies of the triple system, presenting strong gravitational interactions towards the M81 galaxy. The third is represented by the galaxy NGC 3077. During these gravitational interactions, part of hydrogen gas has been ejected from the three, and it currently forms a filamentary gas structure between the galaxies. Furthermore, the process also determined molecular hydrogen gas to be pushed towards the galactic nuclei of the NGC 3077 and M82, which triggered a massive stellar forming process in the center of the two galaxies.

Invisible to the naked eye, the highly popular M81 galaxy may occasionally cause some problems to the unexperienced amateur astronomers, while highly experienced astronomers can observe it relatively easily, under perfect conditions.

The massive quantities of gas stripped from the three galaxies, during gravitational interactions, are estimated to be about 14 to 57 millions times more heavy than the Sun, and are relatively similar to the gas filaments observed in the close proximity of the Milky Way, which could also have their origins in gravitational interactions with the neighboring galaxies in the Local Group.