M104 (Sombrero Galaxy) in infrared — JWST's mid-infrared view dissolves the Sombrero's bright bulge and reveals a smooth inner disk wrapped in a clumpy outer ring of dust — knots where carbon-rich molecules trace pockets of star formation.

M104 (Sombrero Galaxy) in visible — Hubble's classic portrait: a brilliant bulge of old stars crossed by the Sombrero's defining feature — a thick, sharply silhouetted lane of dark dust ringing the edge-on disk.

M104 (Sombrero Galaxy) in ultraviolet — In ultraviolet the Sombrero is faint and smooth — a quiet, ageing galaxy with little ongoing star formation, its glow dominated by the diffuse light of its old stellar population.

M104 (Sombrero Galaxy) in xray — Chandra reveals a halo of hot gas around the Sombrero and a swarm of X-ray binaries, with a bright nucleus marking the accreting billion-solar-mass black hole at its centre.

M104 (Sombrero Galaxy) in multi — The Great Observatories combined: Chandra's blue halo of hot gas, Hubble's starlight, and Spitzer's infrared dust ring assemble the Sombrero's full multi-wavelength portrait.

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Deep-sky object

Sombrero Galaxy

Another cosmic wonder

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Andromeda Galaxy

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Centaurus A

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M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy)

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M82 (Cigar Galaxy)

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Cassiopeia A

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M104 (Sombrero Galaxy)

An edge-on galaxy with a vast glowing bulge and a sharply defined ring of dark dust — its brim — wrapped around a billion-solar-mass black hole.

The Sombrero Galaxy, M104, is one of the most recognisable galaxies in the sky — an edge-on disk about 30 million light-years away in Virgo, whose enormous bright bulge and sharply defined ring of dark dust give it the look of a wide- brimmed hat. It is a strange hybrid: the bulge is as large and luminous as a giant elliptical galaxy, yet it is wrapped in a flat, dusty spiral disk. At its heart sits one of the most massive black holes known in a nearby galaxy, around a billion times the Sun's mass. Unlike the furious starbursts of M82, the Sombrero is a quiet, ageing galaxy forming few new stars — a fact written across the spectrum: ultraviolet shows only a faint smooth glow, JWST's infrared eye dissolves the bulge to reveal the clumpy dust ring, and Chandra finds a halo of hot gas and X-ray binaries surrounding the old stellar city.