NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged the Sombrero Galaxy with its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera).
The image 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.
The James Webb Space Telescope previously imaged the Sombrero galaxy at mid-infrared wavelengths in late 2024.
Studying galaxies like the Sombrero at different wavelengths, including the near-infrared and mid-infrared with Webb, as well as the visible with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, helps astronomers understand how this complex system of stars, dust, and gas formed and evolved, along with the interplay of that material.