The Sombrero galaxy and its glowing halo of stars have never looked this good.
The U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab released the latest photo of the popular hat-shaped galaxy on Friday. A telescope in Chile observed it four years ago, but the color imaging was not completed until this week.
Located approximately 30 million light-years away, this spiral galaxy — formally known as Messier 104 — is one of the largest in the constellation Virgo cluster. It’s an estimated 50,000 light-years across. A light year is about 6 trillion miles.
Captured in incredible detail, the galaxy's stellar halo appears to be triple the size of the sombrero itself.
A dark energy camera on the telescope also caught a stream of stars pouring out of the galaxy's southern edge. Scientists believe the stars in this stream, as well as the halo, were ripped from other galaxies in a long-ago collision.
Astronomers discovered the galaxy back in the 1700s.
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