A Galaxy Seen Edge-On — M104 The Sombrero #Shorts

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Last one. Face south, look about a third of the way up. That's where this lives.

[00:00:05]Down there is Corvus, the crow, a small four-sided box of stars, an ancient constellation that the Greeks said was a raven that lied to Apollo and got banished to the sky for it. Up and to the right of Corvus is the spot, empty sky, a few stars. Even with binoculars, it stays hidden until you point a telescope at it. [music] That's the Sombrero, a galaxy seen edge-on, tilted just enough that the dust lane wrapping around its disk cuts a dark band across the bright bulge in the middle. That bulge [music] is hiding something extraordinary. At the center of M104 sits a supermassive black hole about a billion times the mass of our sun, hundreds of times bigger than the one at the heart of our own Milky Way, 28 million light-years away, and the telescope picks up that dust lane like it was right there in the room.

[00:00:51]Follow for [music] more, and the telescope I used to take this picture is linked in the description.