Astronomy|A quiescent galaxy hides places where stars are still being formed.
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
The James Webb space telescope also studies familiar objects in a new light.
Infrared light revealed dusty clumps on the outer edge of the familiar sombrero galaxy.
At the center of the galaxy is a supermassive black hole that can be seen as a bull’s eye. In the past, chaos was visible in the center of the galaxy. It was like a big bulge in the Sombrero.
The Sombrero Galaxy produces stars at a slower rate than the Milky Way, only one mass of the Sun per year.
Webb will enter its fourth year in the summer of 2025. It is more in demand than ever.
A space telescope James Webb sometimes turns its precise mirrors also to objects and galaxies that are already quite familiar to astronomers.
The joy of the review is that Webb sees the objects in a new light. Then it might find something new even in an old object.
The harmonious and often described Sombrero galaxy revealed something new when Webb peered into it: In the new light, the galaxy no longer looked like the wide-brimmed Mexican sombrero from which it got its name.
With infrared light the observation made revealed dusty clumps at the outer edge of the galaxy. Astronomers say it is the region of the sombrero galaxy where stars are still being formed.
The lumps slightly break the harmony that the shape of the galaxy offers.
Webb took a fresh picture with his MIRI device. It can see infrared light through clouds of gas and dust.
The traditional symbols of the sombrero have disappeared in the new image. It has been replaced by a smoother dust ring. In the core, instead of a bright kayo, a kind of bull’s eye is staring out, where in reality a supermassive black hole is lurking.
In older images, taken for example by the Hubble space telescope, the edge of the sombrero galaxy is also thicker and has accumulated a lot of dust.
The large central bulge of the galaxy is more clearly visible. It is larger than galaxies in general
Galaksi hat located about 31 million light years away in the constellation Virgo. It is the largest spiral galaxy in the vicinity of the Earth, if we look at the space within a radius of one hundred million light years from us.
The mass has been estimated to be almost five times larger than the mass of all the stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, says website Space.com.
Therefore, one might assume that a lot of stars are born in the Sombrero. However, it’s the other way around: In Sombrero, the dust forms fewer stars than our own Milky Way.
In Sombero, an estimated number of stars equal to one mass of the Sun are born per year – the Milky Way produces stars twice as fast.
The slow rate of star formation tells astronomers that Sombrero doesn’t have much material to form stars.
Sombrero is in the direction of the Virgo cluster as seen from Earth, but is not a member of the cluster. It is about 25 million light years closer to Earth than the rest of the galaxy cluster, and quite isolated.
At the center of the sombrero is a black hole about a billion times the mass of the Sun. It’s pretty quiet these days too.
Sombrero’s black hole is very passive. It produces a jet barely a few light-years long, says Space.com
Galaksi hat is just one of hundreds of new and disturbing images that Webb has published after the first official photos July 12, 2022.
Astronomers have been asking Webb for more and more observation times. 2,377 proposals have been submitted for the telescope’s fourth year of operation, which will begin in July next year, according to the US space administration Nasa.
They would require nearly 78,000 hours of telescope observing time. That’s nine times more than Webb is capable of, says the website Live Science.