M104 - The Sombrero Galaxy

About This Photograph

The picturesque Sombrero galaxy is a bit of an astronomical enigma. It has features normally associated with an elliptical galaxy (e.g., the large central bulge) but features a prominent ring of dust and gas more typical of spiral galaxies. It also has a bright, active nucleus shown in the 1990s to be home to a supermassive black hole weighing in at roughly one billion times the mass of the sun, the closest such object to Earth. This is over 200 times the mass of the Milky Way's central black hole, yet M104 is only about a third the size of our home galaxy. It is about 31 million light years away in the constellation of Virgo.