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| The Sombrero Galaxy Messier 104 in the Constellation Virgo. Image Credit: Pip Stakkert, Data Credit: PIRATE Robotic Telescope BVR filters, Mount Teide Tenerife, telescope.org. Open Observatories, Open University. |
" The Constellations Virgo and Leo Major are now visible in our southern sky around about midnight when and if the clouds disappear. As has been said previously, the weather in Lowestoft continues poor but last night we did get an hour or two, when we could see stars through intermittent high level cloud.
Being ever resourceful, our ageing Director, Kurt Thrust had programmed the robotic telescope PIRATE on Mount Teide, to capture data relating to Messier 104 and yesterday it returned that data package via the internet. The above image shows this interesting galaxy in colour". - Joel Cairo CEO of the JPO the UK's most easterly Astronomical Observatory.
Detailed description of Messier 104 aka The Sombrero Galaxy:
"The Sombrero Galaxy is one of the most striking galaxies visible from Earth, its luminous structure giving the unmistakable impression of a cosmic hat suspended in the darkness of intergalactic space. Located in the constellation Virgo, the galaxy lies roughly 28–30 million light-years away and spans about 50,000 light-years across.
Seen almost perfectly edge-on, its appearance is dominated by a brilliant, spheroidal bulge of old stars intersected by a sharply defined lane of cold interstellar dust that traces the plane of its disk. This dense band absorbs starlight along our line of sight, producing the dark “brim” that gives the galaxy its name. Above and below the disk extends a diffuse stellar halo, while the central region contains a supermassive black hole with a mass of roughly a billion Suns, embedded within the bright nucleus.
Despite its elegant symmetry, the Sombrero is a complex system. Morphologically it resembles an early-type spiral galaxy, yet its unusually large central bulge and relatively smooth disk have led astronomers to classify it as somewhat peculiar, possibly shaped by past mergers with smaller galaxies. Evidence for this history is preserved in the galaxy’s remarkable halo of around 2,000 globular clusters, roughly ten times the number orbiting the Milky Way. Many of these clusters are ancient—between 10 and 13 billion years old—making them relics from the earliest epochs of galaxy formation.
The Sombrero is also the dominant member of a small galaxy group, sometimes referred to as the M104 Group, situated near the outskirts of the broader Virgo Cluster. Within this local environment, the Sombrero’s immense gravitational influence binds numerous faint dwarf galaxies that orbit it as satellites, forming a modest but dynamically coherent system. Estimates of the group’s total mass suggest a halo containing tens of trillions of solar masses, largely in the form of dark matter.
Images captured from high-altitude observatories such as the Mount Teide Observatory reveal this galaxy in extraordinary clarity. At such sites, thin atmosphere and dark skies allow the Sombrero’s structure to emerge with remarkable contrast: the razor-thin dust lane cutting across the brilliant stellar bulge, surrounded by a faint halo where globular clusters and distant background galaxies quietly populate the field.
In astrophysical terms, the Sombrero Galaxy offers a glimpse into a transitional class of galaxies—systems that combine the ordered rotation of spiral disks with the massive stellar bulges more typical of elliptical galaxies. Yet to the eye, even through a modest telescope, its appearance remains simple and evocative: a solitary, luminous hat of stars drifting through the deep sky, marking the presence of a vast island universe far beyond our own". - Professor G.P.T. Chat visiting astrophysicist at the Jodrell Plank Observatory.
