Sombrero in Infrared
The Sombrero Galaxy holds roughly 2,000 globular clusters, ten times the Milky Way's count, and a warped inner disc read as evidence of a merger.
Scan to see it on your wall
See it on your wallAR is unavailable on Android devices
Stand back a metre and pan slowly - even light helps
Messier 104 sits around 30 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, turned nearly edge-on. Pierre Mechain, a French comet hunter, logged it in 1781. Its mass runs to about 800 billion Suns. Near-infrared light passes through dust more easily than visible light does, so the dust lane thins and the huge central bulge is lit instead.
Around that bulge lie roughly 2,000 globular clusters, ten times what the Milky Way holds. Each contains hundreds of thousands of old stars, bound by gravity. Low in the right-hand corner a straight blue-white streak crosses the star field. It is one arm of the telescope's own diffraction spike from a bright foreground star. From this angle the inner disc appears tilted inward, like the beginning of a funnel, and that warp is read as evidence of a merger over billions of years.
