Astronomers released new images of the Sombrero Galaxy that reveal its intricacies in stunning detail. The pictures were captured by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, which sits atop the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Victor M. Blanco 4-Meter Telescope in Chile.
Formally known as Messier 104, the galaxy is located in the Virgo constellation, about 30 million light-years from Earth. In the night sky, it can just be seen with a small telescope or binoculars, but it is a popular target for amateur sky-gazers. From Earth, the galaxy appears almost entirely flat, like a disk, except for a huge central bulge that is the origin of its “sombrero” nickname.
In the new images, the galaxy’s bright core is shown amid 2,000 globular star clusters—conglomerations of stars that are tightly bound together by gravity. The disk’s rim appears darker, a sign of the space dust and hydrogen that have accumulated at the galaxy’s perimeter, forming what’s known as a dust lane. That area is also where the majority of the galaxy’s star formation happens.
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Messier 104 spans 50,000 light-years and has a central supermassive black hole that has a mass roughly equivalent to one billion suns. In the new images, the galaxy is surrounded by its halo, which appears to be around three times its width. “This may be the first time the halo has been captured with this level of detail and at this large a scale,” wrote the U.S. National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) in a statement.
The galaxy was first spotted by French astronomer Pierre Méchain in 1781 while he was working with Charles Messier, an astronomer who compiled noncomet astronomical bodies into a list that bears his name today. While the Sombrero Galaxy was not in the initial publication of that list, it was later discovered that Messier had added it by hand to his personal copy. Astronomer William Herschel is also recorded as observing the galaxy in 1784. In 1921 Messier 104 was formally added to the list after another astronomer, Camille Flammarion, confirmed its discovery.