Overview
- NSF NOIRLab released a new photo of the Sombrero Galaxy captured by the 570‑megapixel Dark Energy Camera on the Víctor M. Blanco 4‑meter Telescope in Chile.
- The image shows a glowing halo that appears more than three times the galaxy’s width, which NOIRLab says may be the first capture at this scale and detail.
- DECam also picked up a faint stellar stream on the galaxy’s southern side, with both features reported as debris that points to a past merger with a smaller companion.
- The camera resolves hallmark details of the system, including an intensely bright core, a thin dark dust band around the disk, and roughly 2,000 surrounding globular clusters.
- The Sombrero, also known as Messier 104, sits about 30 million light‑years away in Virgo and spans roughly 50,000 light‑years, and DECam—built at Fermilab for the Dark Energy Survey—continues to deliver research images after DES ended in 2019.