Sombrero Galaxy (M104 · NGC 4594) — Sa in Virgo
The Sombrero Galaxy (M104, NGC 4594) as a framed fine art print. Sa in Virgo, 8.5 arcminutes across, its light 52 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA…
About Sombrero Galaxy (M104 · NGC 4594)
The Sombrero Galaxy is one of the most famous objects in the sky. A brilliant central bulge and a thin disc cut by a dark lane of dust give it its hat-like shape. It holds an unusually large population of globular clusters, perhaps around 2,000, and a black hole at its centre of roughly a billion times the mass of the Sun. The Sombrero was also one of the first galaxies whose light was found to be moving away from us, an early clue that the universe is expanding.
What you are looking at
The Sombrero Galaxy is an early-type spiral: a large, bright central bulge wrapped in smooth, tightly wound arms. It is tilted about 59° to our line of sight, enough to show both the shape of its arms and the depth of its disc. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 128,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about 1.3 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as a LINER galaxy: its nucleus shows the faint, low-level activity of a black hole feeding slowly. It is cited in 1,488 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 42 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of the Sombrero Galaxy is light that left it about 52 million years ago; on Earth, the planet had come through its hottest interval since the dinosaurs. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,088 km/s (2.4 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe. For a galaxy this close, its own motion through space is a large share of that speed, so the distance worked out from it is approximate; distances measured from individual stars in it can differ.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, the Sombrero Galaxy sits within the constellation Virgo. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 38° high in the south, seen from the middle of the United States.
Its neighbours
At almost the same distance from us, and so its neighbours in space as well as on the sky: NGC 4700 (2.3° away on the sky, at least 2,050,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 24 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 42407 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sa |
| Angular diameter | 8.45′ |
| Right ascension | 12h39m59.4s |
| Declination | -11°37′22.8″ |
| Constellation | Virgo |
| Inclination | 59.4° |
| Light travel time | 52 million years |
| Bar | not recorded |
Check every figure above in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database
What is sold
A print of this galaxy and the record of the calculation, once. When it sells it leaves the register and is not offered again. We assign no names and no ownership — nobody can sell you those.
At 8.5 arcminutes this is a Exceptional galaxy, which is the tier where a real photograph shows clear structure and dust lanes. The tier comes from the measured diameter, not from a price list.
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