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I think that first, we have to properly appreciate the size of the Sombrero Galaxy. It is roughly 50,000 light years (15 kilo parsecs) in diameter. That might be only half of the diameter of our own Milky Way galaxy, but still makes each and every pixel on the photograph you're attaching in your question stretch more than 100 light years in distance. That's ...

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The sizes of dust particles varies enormously, and thus the density of dust particles depend upon which sizes we are talking about. The dust size distribution can be described by a power law with a slope of roughly $-3.5$; that is, the density of 0.1 µm particles of is $10^{-3.5}$ times that of 0.01 µm particles, or roughly 3000 times smaller. Moreover, the ...

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Based on 1995A&A...303..673E, How far apart they are? No idea. Somebody else might help to provide a density distribution. Are they grouped in clumps or relatively even spaced? This is what I really wanted to answer. They are in a concentric ring-like structure around the galaxy. The maximum optical depth is 0.8 with a mean value of 0.3. By the way, ...

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