Sombrero galaxy’s turbulent past unveiled by Webb telescope

A striking new view from the James Webb Space Telescope captures the Sombrero galaxy glowing in near-infrared light.

The portrait exposes a brilliant central bulge while softening the famous dark dust lane that circles the disk, offering a fresh look at the galaxy’s structure and turbulent history.

The image comes from Webb’s NIRCam instrument and follows mid-infrared observations taken late in 2024.

Together with visible-light data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the new frame lets researchers compare how stars, dust, and gas behave across different wavelengths.

Galaxy dust revealed in infrared

In visible light, the Sombrero’s rim of dust looks like a dense, murky ring that nearly hides the galaxy’s bright center.

Near-infrared wavelengths, however, slip through many of those grains. As a result, the lane appears thinner and the underlying stars shine more clearly.

Located about 30 million light-years from Earth on the outskirts of the Virgo cluster, the Sombrero galaxy boasts a mass roughly eight hundred billion times that of the Sun.

The galaxy’s disk stretches across nearly 50,000 light-years, and its central bulge swells like a luminous pearl.

That pearl glows even brighter in the near-infrared because thousands of older, cooler stars dominate the bulge and radiate strongly at longer wavelengths.

Signs of a turbulent past

Despite the Sombrero galaxy’s serene appearance, earlier surveys uncovered evidence that it has endured violent mergers.

A subtle warp in the inner disk, odd twists in the dust lane, and unexpected chemical patterns in surrounding star clusters all point to collisions with at least one sizable companion in the distant past.

Webb’s sharp resolution reveals this warp in greater detail: the inner disk tilts inward like the shallow mouth of a funnel rather than lying flat. Simulations show similar patterns when two galaxies collide and then settle into a single system.

Clues from 2,000 globular clusters

Roughly 2,000 globular clusters – spherical swarms of hundreds of thousands of ancient stars – orbit the Sombrero.

Spectroscopic studies reveal that those stars do not share identical chemical fingerprints. Instead, the amounts of oxygen, neon, and heavier elements vary more than expected if all the clusters formed in one burst.

A series of mergers provides a neat explanation: each infalling galaxy contributed its own population of clusters, mixing their distinct chemistries into the halo we see today.

Edge-on view with a twist

From Earth we see the Sombrero almost edge on, but not perfectly so. Our vantage point sits about six degrees above the galaxy’s true equator, letting astronomers peek slightly over the rim.

That modest tilt is crucial. It lets light from the bulge leak through gaps in the dust and exposes the warped inner disk that hints at past turmoil.

If the galaxy were perfectly edge on, that interior twist would remain hidden behind the rim.

Giants glow, dwarfs fade

Near-infrared light favors large, cool stars. In Webb’s frame, red giants – stellar elders that have swelled to enormous size – dot the scene like crimson embers.

Smaller, hotter blue stars emit more strongly at shorter wavelengths, so they fade in the near-infrared and almost vanish in the mid-infrared.

That spectral filtering helps astronomers separate different stellar populations and trace how star formation shifted over billions of years.

Galaxy colors and cosmic expansion

The Sombrero is not alone in the new image. Dozens of background galaxies speckle the black canvas, each tinted by distance and composition.

Pale blue spirals likely sit closer to us, their young stars still blazing in ultraviolet and visible light that stretches only slightly into the infrared.

Deep-red smudges probably lie billions of light-years farther away; their light has traveled so long that cosmic expansion has stretched their spectra deep into the infrared.

By sampling those color clues, researchers can estimate distances and ages for thousands of remote systems in a single field.

Why multiple wavelengths matter

Combining Webb’s near- and mid-infrared data with Hubble’s visible-light images is like slicing the galaxy into overlapping transparencies.

One layer reveals hidden stars behind the dust, another traces the dust itself, and a third shows where shorter wavelengths are completely blocked.

Together these layers chart how gas cooled, where dust condensed, and how gravitational encounters reshaped the entire structure. Without multi-wavelength coverage, many of those details would remain invisible.

Complex life cycles of galaxies

The Sombrero portrait demonstrates Webb’s ability to probe the universe on every scale – from red giants glowing in a nearby galaxy to faint smudges at the cosmic horizon.

By resolving individual stars, mapping chemical fingerprints, and spotting structural ripples, Webb helps astronomers untangle the complex life cycles of galaxies.

Its infrared eyes also complement Hubble’s vision, ensuring that discoveries flow from one observatory to the next.

Peering into the future

Future Webb campaigns will target other “edge-on” disks to test whether similar warps point to hidden mergers. Spectroscopy will break the Sombrero’s light into elemental signatures, refining mass estimates and tracking star-formation bursts through cosmic time.

Each new dataset will feed into computer simulations that replay a galaxy’s past, revealing how quiet spirals can mask dramatic histories.

The Sombrero’s near-infrared glow thus serves as both a snapshot and a clue. It shows the galaxy as it exists today – luminous, dusty, and slightly warped. It also hints at collisions long ago that seeded its halo with diverse clusters and bent its inner disk.

Thanks to Webb’s sharp vision, astronomers now hold a more complete record of that journey and a clearer path toward understanding how galaxies everywhere live, collide, and evolve.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

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