Sombrero Galaxy

At a glance

Key points

Webb's infrared view turns the picture inside out: the ring glows and the bulge fades.

• Viewed only 6° from edge-on
• About 2,000 globular clusters
• Its dust ring glows in Webb's infrared

Two views

In visible light the dust ring is a dark band silhouetted against starlight. In Webb's mid-infrared images the same dust glows, breaking into clumps where gas gathers, while the starlit bulge almost vanishes.

A late entry in Messier's list

Pierre Méchain found the Sombrero in May 1781, just after Charles Messier's catalogue of 103 objects had gone to print, so it missed the published list. Messier noted it by hand in his own copy. William Herschel came across it independently in 1784 and it later entered the New General Catalogue as NGC 4594. Only in 1921 did Camille Flammarion match Messier's handwritten note to Herschel's object and add it to the Messier list as M104, the first of several posthumous additions.

What Webb added

Webb has imaged M104 twice. MIRI's mid-infrared view, released in November 2024, showed the outer ring breaking into clumps rich in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon-bearing molecules that often mark star-forming gas. Even so, the ring makes less than one solar mass of stars a year, about half the Milky Way's rate. NIRCam's near-infrared image of June 2025 shows the dust silhouetted against the disc and picks out the galaxy's roughly 2,000 globular clusters as points of light around a smooth core.

A quiet giant black hole

The core holds a black hole of about 9 billion solar masses, larger than the one in M87 imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. Yet it is classed as a low-luminosity active nucleus: it feeds slowly on infalling material and drives only a small, bright jet. X-rays from the compact centre suggest that material is still falling in.

Observing it

At magnitude 8.0 the Sombrero is beyond naked-eye reach, but a small telescope shows an elongated glow, and larger apertures under dark skies reveal the dust lane as a thin dark line along one side. It sits in southern Virgo near the border with Corvus, close to the celestial equator, so it is visible from both hemispheres and best placed in evening skies around May.

Missions

1. 1990–

   Hubble Space Telescope

   NASA / ESAActive

   Ultraviolet to near-infrared imaging from low Earth orbit.

   Mission page (opens in a new tab)

2. 2021–

   James Webb Space Telescope

   NASA / ESA / CSAActive

   Infrared observatory at Sun–Earth L2, about 1.5 million km from Earth.

   Mission page (opens in a new tab)

Related entries

• Messier 87Giant elliptical with the first imaged black hole
• Whirlpool GalaxyM51 · the textbook grand-design spiral

Sources

1. ESA: ESA/Webb weic2427a: Sombrero (MIRI) (opens in a new tab)
2. Deep Sky Corner: M104 discovery history (Méchain 1781, Flammarion 1921) (opens in a new tab)
3. NASA Science: Hubble Messier catalog: M104 (opens in a new tab)
4. ESA: ESA/Hubble opo0328a (opens in a new tab)
5. ESA: ESA/Webb: Sombrero galaxy (opens in a new tab)
6. ESA: ESA/Webb weic2427: Sombrero in mid-infrared (opens in a new tab)

Last reviewed 10 Oct 2026 against these sources. Built from public NASA, ESA and JPL data; not affiliated with or endorsed by any agency.