Messier 104 – The Sombrero Galaxy

Messier 104 (M104) is at the very southern edge of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster () in the Virgo Constellation and is roughly 30 million light years away from us.

It’s main body is only half the diameter, at 50,000 light years across, of our Milky Way Galaxy. But it’s much more dense than our galaxy. The Milky Way contains 100 billion to 400 billion stars. But M104 contains as many as 800 billion!

Further, M104 is surrounded by more than 2,000 globular clusters—ten times as many as the Milky Way. And while the black hole at the center of the Milky Way has an impressive mass of four-million suns, M104 dwarfs this with a central black hole weighing in at a mass of one billion suns!

M104 is near and dear to my heart. In elementary school, we used to get these booklets from the Nelson Doubleday Science Service:

In first grade, I got a copy of the booklet on the lower right. In it was this image of M104 taken by the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar Observatory in the 1950s:

That image sparked what would become a lifelong interest in astronomy.