The Sombrero Galaxy Is a Hat Only in Short Exposures
M104 earns its nickname on short exposures: it looks like a hat. A much longer exposure brings up a hairy past instead, revealing a bright, hazy halo that extends well past the central disk and contains many stars the image cannot resolve. The hat is largely an artifact of how briefly we looked.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Context
Deeper images get stranger: within that stellar haze, structures become visible, including a diagonal ring.
Reply
And the scale is unhelpful for intuition — light takes about 30 million years to reach us from the Sombrero, which spans roughly 150 thousand light years.