Resembling a wide-brimmed hat with a tall bulge at the center, galaxy M104 is nicknamed the Sombrero Galaxy. Far larger than any hat on Earth, this Sombrero is 50,000 light-years wide. We see the galaxy nearly edge-on, so the dark dust in its pancake-like disk appears to bisect a large, white, rounded core of stars. Roughly 29 million light-years away, the Sombrero can be spotted with a modest telescope in the constellation Virgo.

Using Hubble, a team of astronomers led by John Kormendy of the University of Hawaii found evidence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Sombrero Galaxy. Estimated to be as massive as a billion Suns, it’s one of the heftiest black holes in the neighboring universe.

Hubble observations also reveal that the Sombrero Galaxy includes nearly 2,000 globular clusters — 10 times more than in our galaxy. Globular clusters are giant, spherical-shaped groups of stars that are sometimes older than the galaxy in which they reside. The Sombrero’s globular clusters range from 10 billion to 13 billion years old, similar to those in the Milky Way.

Several teams of astronomers have used Hubble and telescopes on the ground to study the Sombrero’s globular clusters. They’ve found that some clusters are rich in elements heavier than helium (which astronomers call “metals”) and some are poor. Among other findings, the observations reveal that the “metal-rich” clusters are concentrated in the galaxy’s bulge and that they are typically smaller than the “metal-poor” ones. Such studies are helping astronomers figure out how ancient globular clusters developed early in the universe’s history.

Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

The Sombrero Galaxy, or Messier 104, is an odd galaxy, roughly 31 million light years from Earth. This family of stars is noted for its massive brightly lit center, surrounded by dark, intricate lanes of dark dust.

The very center of this mighty stellar cauldron is home to a supermassive black hole, one billion times more massive than our Sun. The entire Sombrero Galaxy has 800 billion times the mass of our parent star – about half that of the Milky Way.

M104 – too dim to be seen with the unaided eye, but an easy find with telescopes, was discovered in 1781 by the French astronomer and comet hunter Pierre Méchain.

The light forming this image left its source roughly 15 million light years after Old and New World primates parted ways, but five million years before the first apes developed, and began to shape language. About this time, Earth was suffering through an extended ice age, with glaciers reaching toward the equator, driving the Eocene–Oligocene extinction event.

This new composite photo from The Cosmic Companion was created from 14 red, green, blue, and luminance images recorded over 70 minutes, using the 0.6-metre CHI-1 Telescope in Chile, operated by Telescope Live.