Stunning View of the Sombrero Galaxy is One of the Largest Mosaics Ever Assembled from Hubble Observations

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has trained its razor-sharp eye on one of the universe’s most photogenic galaxies, Messier 104 (M104) – otherwise known as the Sombrero galaxy! (Click image to zoom in)

As seen from Earth, the Sombrero is tilted nearly edge-on, viewed from just six degrees north of its equatorial plane. The name Sombrero comes from its resemblance to the broad rim and high-topped Mexican hat.

The galaxy’s hallmark is a dazzling, white, bulbous core encircled by thick dust lanes responsible for its spiral structure. Those lanes are actually the sites of star formation in the galaxy. And the center: it’s thought to be home to a massive black hole!

The Sombrero galaxy’s rich system of globular clusters, estimated to be nearly 2,000 in number – about 10 times more than the number of globular clusters in our Milky Way galaxy – has made it easy for Hubble to resolve them. That ages of the clusters are similar to those in the Milky Way, bay the way: they range from 10 to 13 billion years old.

And in the bright core of M104 there lies embedded a smaller disk tilted relative to the large disk. X-ray emission tests suggest that there is material falling into the compact core, meaning there may be one-billion-solar-mass black hole residing there. Yupp, that’s a big black hole.

The Sombrero galaxy has an apparent magnitude of 8, which is beyond the limit of naked-eye visibility but can nevertheless be spotted through small telescopes most easily during May. M104 is 28 million light-years away from us in the constellation Virgo, and with a mass equal to 800 billion suns, it is one of the most massive objects in the Virgo galaxy cluster altogether.

Sources: 1, 2, 3