Monday Bites: The Sombrero

Monday Bites: The Sombrero

Credit: NASA/CSC/SAO

To astronomers squinting at their telescopes, the Sombrero galaxy gives the appearance of a Mexican hat. Hence, the name. This peculiar object lies 11.5° west of Spica, the brightest star in the Virgo constellation, and right on the outer border of the neighboring constellation of Corvus. Thirty-one million light-years away, the Sombrero packs the mass of 800 billion suns with a supermassive black hole (itself) weighing over a billion solar masses hiding away at the galactic center. 

Almost edge-on, tilted at 6

Credit: NASA/ESA 

° degrees toward our field of view, the Sombrero spots an intensely bright central core surrounded by a dark rim of cold molecular hydrogen gas. Unlike other galaxies, the Sombrero falls under no particular class of galaxies. Sombrero's bulbous core gives the appearance of an E0-type elliptical galaxy as per Edwin Hubble's scheme, and on the other hand, its hula-hoop rings of gas circling around the core pushes Sombrero towards the house of some spiral-type galaxy.  

Credit: NASA/JPL

While the intense white light from the central bulge washes out the dust lanes, seeing through infrared light, one can confirm that the Sombrero's structure is much more complicated. The same also affirms that while no new stars are forming all throughout the bulbous core of the galaxy, new stars are coming to light in the outer rims. To date, the Hubble Space Telescope has successfully resolved over 2,000 globular clusters, which is 10 times higher than we've identified in our own galaxy — a brilliant milestone in the field of extragalactic astronomy.  

[Top] A composite of X-ray, optical, and infrared observations reveals the Sombrero to be a hub of ongoing activity as X-rays spread over a distribution of 60,000 light-years, possibly driven by past supernovae.