M104: The Sombrero
Galaxy
From NASA’s AstronomyPicture of the Day
The striking spiral
galaxy M104 is famous for its nearly edge-on profile
featuring a broad ring of obscuring dust lanes.
Seen in silhouette
against an extensive bulge of stars, the swath of cosmic
dust lends a broad brimmed hat-like appearance to the galaxy
suggesting the more popular moniker, The Sombrero Galaxy.
Hubble Space Telescope
and ground-based Subaru data have been reprocessed with amateur color image
data to create this sharp view of the well-known
galaxy.
The processing results
in a natural color appearance and preserves details often lost in overwhelming
glare of M104's bright central bulge when viewed with smaller ground-based
instruments.
Also known as NGC 4594,
the Sombrero galaxy can be seen across
the spectrum and is thought to host a central supermassive black hole.
About 50,000 light-years
across and 28 million light-years away, M104 is one of the largest galaxies at
the southern edge of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster.
