See the Sombrero Galaxy Like Never Before, as the James Webb Telescope Captures It in Unprecedented Detail

Looking at the Hubble Space Telescope’s famous image of the Sombrero Galaxy, it’s pretty clear why said galaxy was named after the Mexican broad-brimmed hat. Now, however, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has produced a mid-infrared light image that reveals the galaxy in unprecedented detail—and challenges its nickname.

The previous visible light images of the Sombrero Galaxy, also known as Messier 104, present a flat disk with a glowing core. The new Webb image, on the other hand, detects infrared light, which has longer and lower-energy wavelengths that are invisible to the naked eye. It reveals a smooth inner disk, a dimmer core and the distribution of dust in the galaxy’s outer ring. The other shapes in the background—mere pinpricks of orange, yellow and green light—are more galaxies, and their colors reveal properties such as their distances from Earth, per a NASA statement.

“JWST eyes the skies in infrared light, where many objects take on surprising appearances that don’t always align with their visible-light counterparts,” Korey Haynes writes for Astronomy magazine. “In particular, infrared vision can peer through dust clouds, make clouds of gas suddenly visible and tone down the light from stars, allowing other features to shine.”

As a result, the Sombrero’s distinctive glowing core region is much dimmer in Webb’s image. Instead, the infrared view shows “intricate clumps” in the galaxy’s outer ring that had not been visible in older infrared images from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, per the statement.

Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) detected carbon-containing molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in these clumps, which can signal the presence of star-forming regions. But even though some young stars arise there, the Sombrero Galaxy “is by no means a prolific star factory,” Jamie Carter writes for Live Science.

In fact, the iconic galaxy births less than one solar mass of stars annually, which is roughly half of what our own galaxy produces, and shockingly less than other galaxies, such as Messier 82, which produces ten times the amount of stars birthed in the Milky Way. This indicates a lack of molecular hydrogen gas in the Sombrero Galaxy, which is needed to form stars, per Space.com’s Keith Cooper.

The Sombrero Galaxy appears to be pretty low-energy overall—even the supermassive black hole at its center “is rather docile,” per the NASA statement, slowly absorbing material falling inward from the galaxy.

This doesn’t mean scientists are any less interested in the iconic galaxy, however. In fact, astronomers are particularly curious about its approximately 2,000 globular clusters, filled with hundreds of thousands of old stars with often similar ages but varying masses and characteristics.

Since the Sombrero Galaxy, at around 30 million light-years away, is visible with small telescopes, amateur astronomers have also taken interest, according to EarthSky’s Kelly Kizer Whitt. It’s too dim to be seen with the naked eye, but telescopes will reveal it in the constellation Virgo. The easiest time to view the galaxy, per NASA, is in May.

For scientists, securing observation time with the Webb telescope is more competitive than ever, per the statement—a record-breaking 2,377 proposals to use it for research were submitted by the October 2024 deadline. With 78,000 hours of observation requested, that’s nine times the telescope’s capacity in a year. The most popular research topic in proposals was galaxies with a high redshift, which means they are very far away and date to the early universe.

Given the strong rate of interest, both professional and amateur astronomers alike can expect more stunning space images from the telescope’s cameras in the future.

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.