Universe

With a relatively bright magnitude of +8, M104 is just beyond the limit of visibility with the naked eye and is easily seen through small telescopes. The Sombrero is located at the southern end of the rich cluster of Virgo galaxies and is one of the most massive objects of that group, equivalent to 800 billion suns. The galaxy is 50,000 light years in diameter and is located 28 million light years from Earth.
Hubble easily solves the rich system of globular clusters of M104, estimated at nearly 2,000 in number, 10 times more than in orbit in our Milky Way galaxy. The ages of the groups are similar to the groups in the Milky Way, which range between 10 and 13 billion years. Embedded in the bright core of M104 is a smaller disk, which is tilted relative to the large disk. The emission of X-rays suggests that there is material that falls in the compact nucleus, where a black hole of 1 trillion solar mass resides.
In the 19th century, some astronomers speculated that M104 was simply a luminous gas rim disk surrounding a young star, which is a prototype of the genesis of our solar system. But in 1912, the astronomer VM Slipher discovered that the hat-like object seemed to move away from us at 700 miles per second. This enormous speed offered some of the earliest clues that the Sombrero was really another galaxy, and that the universe was expanding in all directions.