NASA has published images of the famous Sombrero Galaxy taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). These images have revealed secrets about its past.
The Sombrero Galaxy is located 31 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 800 billion times greater than that of the Sun. It is well known to all astronomy enthusiasts thanks to its distinctive appearance: a bright core surrounded by a band of dust.
At the end of 2024, JWST photographed the Sombrero Galaxy for the first time. At that time, imaging was conducted in the mid-infrared range. This allowed astronomers to see its internal structure and better understand the structure of the surrounding dust disk.
This time, the shooting was done in the near-infrared range. The JWST photo shows the central bulge of Sombrero, a tightly clustered group of stars in the galactic core. The dust ring is also visible in the image.
Studying galaxies in different wavelength ranges helps astronomers understand how they formed and evolved. In the case of Sombrero, they identified a number of anomalies indicating that its “quiet facade” hides traces of a turbulent past in the form of a merger with another galaxy.
One such oddity is stars. There are about 2,000 globular clusters in the Sombrero Galaxy. They consist of hundreds of thousands of old stars held together by gravity. Spectroscopic studies have shown that stars in these globular clusters are surprisingly different from each other, even though they should have similar chemical signatures. The merger of different galaxies could explain this difference. Another piece of evidence supporting the merger theory is the distorted appearance of the Sombrero’s inner disk.
The powerful resolution of JWST also allowed astronomers to distinguish individual stars outside the galaxy, but not necessarily at the same distance from it, some of which appear red. They are called red giants. These are cold stars, but their large surface area causes them to glow brightly in infrared images. Red giants are also detected in the mid-infrared range, while smaller blue stars “disappear” when observed at longer wavelengths.
According to NASA
