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  • Simeis 147 supernova remnant
  • The Great Carina Nebula (NGC 3372)
  • The Great Carina Nebula in False Colours
  • V838 Monocerotis - Light Echo of an Erupting Star
  • Open star cluster Pismis 24
  • Black hole Cygnus X-1
  • A gas cloud near the Milky Way's central black hole
  • Black hole
  • Southern Pinwheel Galaxy (M83) visible light
  • Southern Pinwheel Galaxy M83 Centre
  • NGC 1300
  • The Andromeda Galaxy
  • M104 - The Sombrero Galaxy
  • M104 - The Sombrero Galaxy 2
  • Arp 273
  • NGC 6744 - A Milky Way Twin
  • Edge-On Galaxy NGC 5866
  • Arp 188 - The Tadpole Galaxy
  • The HCG 59 Group of Galaxies
  • Stephan's Quintet
  • Sizes of Galaxies
  • Sizes of Galaxies II
  • Sizes of Galaxies III
  • Supernova 1994D in NGC 4526
  • Our Local Group

29 million light years away from Earth, 4 times more massive than the Milky Way and with a supermassive black hole of at least 1 billion times the mass of the Sun; that's the Sombrero Galaxy. It's a spiral galaxy with a very prominent outer dust lane. The Sombrero Galaxy doesn't look like a normal spiral galaxy since we look at it nearly edge on; it's tilted just 7° to our line-of-sight. The second reason for it looking a bit different is the extended centre (bulge) of the galaxy, with billions of stars causing the diffuse glow in the image. This halo exceeds the edges of the galaxy by about 10000 light years and contains about 2000 globular clusters, 20 times more than our own galaxy has. The galaxy has characteristics of a spiral and an elliptical galaxy at the same time. If you open the full-size image you can see many more details of the galaxy’s structure, such as its star forming regions and also a whole lot of background galaxies. The Sombrero Galaxy can be directly observed even with a smaller telescope, provided that you have a clear sky without too much light pollution.

If you want to see even more details of this galaxy you can have a look at an image of the Sombrero Galaxy that has been reprocessed in a way that reveals just the spiral structure of this galaxy.


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M104 - The Sombrero Galaxy
Published by Published or last modified on 2024-05-22
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