Late last month, NASA released its "Astronomy Picture of the Day"—actually a combo of two pictures, taken two decades apart. The first is a 20-year-old photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the so-called Sombrero Galaxy, a galaxy nearly 30 million light-years away whose oval brim and hazy, glowing, bulging center made it look like a piece of signature Mexican headwear. However, based on a new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, "astronomers may have to rename it the visor galaxy," reports Mashable. That's because the latest photo looks "more like a bull's-eye than a hat," per Live Science, showing a "more elegant, subtle structure with a smooth inner disk," a more detailed outer ring, and none of the signature haze in the middle that made the galaxy resemble a sombrero.
The discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that the Webb Space Telescope shows the galaxy as seen through mid-infrared wavelengths, which pierces through the cloudy bands of dust and gas that hover around the galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope's photo was taken in visible light. The clearer picture now offered can shed some light on what the Sombrero Galaxy, aka Messier 104, is made of, and on the fact that it appears to harbor what Live Science calls a "secret star factory," as shown by the clumps in its outer ring that are believed to churn out new stars.
Not that the galaxy is a huge star-maker: It pops out less than one sunlike star or so a year, while the Milky Way manages to produce around two annually. Still, astronomers are eager to get more intel on the hundreds of thousands of old gravity-bound stars clumped together within the galaxy's rings, as it could help them analyze star composition and, more widely, the galaxy's place in the universe. "This type of system serves as a pseudo-laboratory for astronomers to study stars," says Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute, per Mashable. (More galaxy stories.)
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