NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spots billions year old ‘Sombrero Galaxy’. Take a look!

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured some of the mesmerising pictures of outer space over the years. It had been in operation since the 1990s and since then, it has allowed astronomers to view galaxies of all shapes and sizes from nearly every angle.

One such stunning image captured by one of the greater observatories was shared by NASA—the ‘Sombrero Galaxy’, which is roughly around 40 million light-years away from earth.

Set against a backdrop of remote galaxies, the Sombrero, also known as ‘Little Sombrero’, ‘NGC 7814’ or ‘Caldwell 43’, features a bright central bulge, a thin disk full of dust, and a glowing halo of gas and stars.

In its blog post, NASA stated that a few years ago ‘Sombrero’ galaxy, which is billions of years old, had a bright central bulge and a halo of glowing gas extending out into space.

Dusty spiral arms that appeared in ‘Sombrero’ Galaxy are made of dusty material that absorbs light from the galactic centre.

The galaxy is named Sombrero because it resembles a Mexican hat. Sombrero lies at the southern edge of the rich Virgo cluster of galaxies.

In the 19th century, some astronomers speculated that the galaxy was simply an edge-on disk of luminous gas surrounding a young star, which is prototypical of the genesis of our solar system.

But in 1912, astronomer V M Slipher discovered that the hat-like object appeared to be rushing away from us at 700 miles per second.

This enormous velocity offered some of the earliest clues that the Sombrero was really another galaxy, and that the universe was expanding in all directions.

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