For your weekend enjoyment, here's a beautiful, expansive new view of the Sombrero Galaxy, courtesy of the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco Telescope in Chile.

[coreyspowell@mastodon.social]

For your weekend enjoyment, here's a beautiful, expansive new view of the Sombrero Galaxy, courtesy of the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco Telescope in Chile.

The galaxy's dark "brim" is a ring of dust and cold gas encircling a vast ball of stars.

https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2612/ #space #science #nature

[coreyspowell@mastodon.social]

Zoom in, and the Sombrero Galaxy looks like a starry hat.

Switch to infrared vision (via JWST) and you can make most of the stars disappear, revealing the galaxy's unusually smooth, dusty ring -- less a hat than an enormous space Aerobie.

https://esawebb.org/news/weic2427/ #space #science #astronomy

[coreyspowell@mastodon.social]

The Dark Energy Camera was not designed to take pretty pictures. It was built (as the name gives away!) to study the dark energy that is pushing our universe apart. And it found hints that dark energy may be changing over time, for reasons completely unknown.

https://noirlab.edu/public/programs/ctio/victor-blanco-4m-telescope/decam/https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/the-des-project/instrument/the-camera/ #science #tech #technology

[tsturm@famichiki.jp]

@coreyspowell It's hard to visually comprehend - the glowing halo all around the galaxy is all stars, right?

[coreyspowell@mastodon.social]

@tsturm

Yes, an enormous extended halo of stars. And if you look closely, there's also an even larger, angled streamer of stars around the galaxy (easiest to see at bottom right).

[tsturm@famichiki.jp]

@coreyspowell Whoa! Yes.

I blows my mind every single time when I look at pictures of galaxies and just try and take in how many planets are out there circling all these stars.