Sombrero Galaxy (NIRCam image)

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged the Sombrero galaxy with its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), which shows dust from the galaxy’s outer ring blocking stellar light from stars within the galaxy. In the central region of the galaxy, the roughly 2,000 globular clusters, or collections of hundreds of thousands of old stars held together by gravity, glow in the near-infrared.

The Sombrero Galaxy is around 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. From Earth, we see this galaxy nearly “edge-on,” or from the side.

MIRI’s view of the object can be seen here.

This image was created with Webb data from proposal 6565 (PI: M. Garcia Marin). The assigned filters are as follows: Blue: F090W+F200W, Green: F212N+F277W, Red: F335M+F444W.

[Image description: Image of a galaxy on the black background of space. The galaxy is a very oblong, brownish yellowish disk that extends from left to right at an angle (from about 10 o’clock to 5 o’clock). Mottled dark brown patches rim the edge of the disk and are particularly prominent where they cross directly in front of the galaxy. The galaxy’s center glows white and extends above and below the disk. There are different colored dots, distant galaxies, speckled among the black background of space surrounding the galaxy. At the bottom right, there is a particularly bright foreground star with Webb’s signature diffraction spikes.]