Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged the Sombrero Galaxy with its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), which shows dust from the galaxy’s outer ring blocking stellar light from stars within the galaxy. In the central region of the galaxy, the roughly 2,000 globular clusters, or collections of hundreds of thousands of old stars held together by gravity, glow in the near-infrared.

The Sombrero Galaxy is around 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. From Earth, we see this galaxy nearly “edge-on,” or from the side.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-127

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image Use Policy: http://stsci.edu/copyright/