Scale

More than we can fit inside our tiny skulls

This is a photo of the Sombrero galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

It's tempting to look at this as a star surrounded by clouds of dust, but according to NASA, the glow in the center of the image is caused by billions of old stars and the dust swirling around is made up primarily of younger, brighter stars.

The photo was taken on February 28, 2000, but the image is 50 million years old, since that's how long it took for the light of this galaxy to reach the telescope.