Sometimes an old telescope can still impress. That is certainly the case for Hubble, which is rapidly approaching the 35th anniversary of its launch. To celebrate, the telescope's operators are collaborating with ESA to release a series of stunning new photographs of some of the most iconic astronomical objects the telescope has observed. As of the time of writing, the latest one to be released is a spectacular new image of a favorite of millions of amateur astronomers - the Sombrero Galaxy.
The Sombrero Galaxy (M104) isn't visible to the naked eye, but it's one of the easiest galaxies to find with almost any amateur telescope. Located about 30 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, one of the most stunning features of the Sombrero Galaxy is the angle from which we can see it from Earth. As shown in the picture, the angle is almost edge-on, with a 6-degree tilt allowing a peak over the galaxy's top.
At the center of that galaxy, though still invisible to most telescopes, is a supermassive black hole that weighs about 9 billion times the mass of our Sun. It holds together a galaxy that is also massive, weighing in at about 800 billion stellar masses, making it one of the heaviest objects in the Virgo cluster of almost 2,000 galaxies. That weight is only distributed in an area slightly larger than the Milky Way, as the Sombrero Galaxy is only 105,000 light years across.
