36. SOMBRERO GALAXY

Our own galaxy should have been formed like this magnificent edge-on picture of the Sombrero Galaxy, having the size of the Milky Way. At a distance of 28 million ly and 82.000 ly wide it can be found in the constellation VIRGO. It is one of the larges Hubble mosaics ever assembled, the team took six pictures of the galaxy and then stitched them together to create the final composite image.The photo reveales a myriad of stars in a pancake-shaped disk as wel as a glowing central bulge of stars.