Thursday, March 22, 2012

The Sombrero Galaxy

How is this not a hilarious name?

Another spiral galaxy, this one has most of its dust and gas in a ring around the center unlike ours. Additionally, its central supermassive black hole is much larger than ours and it has many more globular clusters than our galaxy. The Sombrero galaxy is also home to bright, younger stars making it twice as useful to study, since you get both the really old and really new stars within it. However, this sombrero is not without its mystery; due to the amount of dust in the central, much of the light coming from it is scattered, making that portion difficult to study. Astronomers are also not quite sure why there is so much dust in this galaxy, though it has been proposed that it is due to a dissolved bar.

The Sombrero galaxy is overhead at midnight now (RA ~12:40) with a declination of ~-11:37, so if you have a telescope at home you should be able to see it, as it is also a pretty bright galaxy (+9 magnitude) for being about 30 million light years away (that's something to think about while looking at it!).


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