The Sombrero galaxy seen in mid-infrared light – Credit NASA

In a new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the nature of the Sombrero galaxy seems completely different.

When seen in visible light, the galactic core whites out the inner disk, while the outer disk roils with dust and gas.

The Sombrero galaxy seen imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in visible light – Credit: NASA

But when seen under Webb’s mid-infrared view, the Sombrero galaxy, also known as Messier 104 (M104), the core does not shine; instead, a smooth inner disk is revealed.

The sharp resolution of Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) also brings into focus details of the galaxy’s outer ring, providing insights into how the dust, an essential building block for astronomical objects in the universe, is distributed. The galaxy’s outer ring, which appeared smooth like a blanket in imaging from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, shows intricate clumps in the infrared for the first time.

Researchers say the clumpy nature of the dust, where MIRI detects carbon-containing molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, can indicate the presence of young star-forming regions.

However, unlike some galaxies studied with Webb, the Sombrero galaxy is not a particular hotbed of star formation. The rings of the Sombrero galaxy produce less than one solar mass of stars per year, in comparison to the Milky Way’s roughly two solar masses a year.

Even the supermassive black hole, also known as an active galactic nucleus, at the center of the Sombrero galaxy is rather docile, despite its hefty 9-billion-solar masses. It’s classified as a low-luminosity nucleus.

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Also within the Sombrero galaxy dwell some 2,000 globular clusters, collections of hundreds of thousands of old stars held together by gravity. This type of system serves as a pseudo laboratory for astronomers to study thousands of stars within one system with the same age, but of varying masses and other properties; an intriguing opportunity for comparison studies.

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In the MIRI image, galaxies of varying shapes and colors litter the background of space. The different colors of these background galaxies can tell astronomers about their properties, including how far away they are.

The Sombrero galaxy is around 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo.

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