A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a stunning and fashionable sight: the Sombrero Galaxy, named for its resemblance to the traditional Mexican hat. With its wide, flat shape reminiscent of the hat’s wide brim, the galaxy, also known as Messier 104, has outer rings that are clearly visible for the first time.
The Sombrero Galaxy is located 30 million light-years away, in the constellation of Virgo, and it has been previously imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. But while in the Hubble image, the galaxy appears as an opaque, pale disk, in the new Webb image you can see an outer blue disk, with a small bright core right at the center.
The difference in the two images is because of the different wavelengths that the telescopes operate in. Hubble takes images primarily in the visible light part of the spectrum, which is the same wavelength as our eyes see, and galaxies with large amounts of dust like the Sombrero therefore appear opaque. But Webb operates in the infrared portion of the spectrum, meaning it can peer through the dust to see structures that would otherwise be invisible.
The Webb image also shows more detail about the dust that makes up the outer portion of the galaxy’s ring. If you look closely, you can see that the blue-white shape is clumpy, with dust unevenly distributed in pockets that are denser in some places than others. This region is interesting to scientists because it is contains molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are usually found in regions where many young stars are forming. But the rate of star formation in this galaxy is quite low, with the rings of the Sombrero producing half as many stars per year as our own galaxy.
Another feature of this image is the bright glow at the galaxy’s center, which is an area around the galaxy’s supermassive black hole called an active galactic nucleus (AGN). This region isn’t as bright as some other AGNs, as the black hole at the center is relatively calm, not chowing down on huge amounts of material as is seen in some other galaxies.