WISE

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

Observation • December 14th, 2010

M104 is also known as the Sombrero galaxy. Although M104 is classified as a spiral galaxy, it has a very different appearance than NGC 300. In part, this is because the dusty, star-forming spiral disk in M104 is seen nearly edge-on from our point of view. M104 also has a large, ball-shaped bulge component of older stars, seen here in blue. In visible light, a dark dust lane extends across the galaxy, blocking out some of the bright starlight in the disk behind it, and causing it to resemble a sombrero. This dust lane encircles the entire galaxy and glows brightly in infrared; it is seen here as bright circle surrounding a dense galactic core.