Is our galaxys Nuclear Bulge visible?
Haha, by coincidence I read about this in an astronomy textbook today! It said that “we cannot see the nucleus in visible light or in the ultraviolet, because those wavelengths are absorbed by the intervening interstellar dust. High energy X rays and gamma rays, however, force their way through the interstellar medium and are recorded by instruments on rockets and satellites. Also, the infrared and radio radiation, whose wavelengths are long compared to the sizes of the interstellar grains, flow around them and reach us from the center of the Galaxy.” Edit: I’m also going to say that you should download the program called Stellarium. It’s a real-time simulation of our night sky. It’s pretty neat. I typed in black hole and it brought my view to the centre of the galaxy. I’ll link it in the sources.
Yes, you can see the outer edges of the bulge. It appears in and around the constellation Sagittarius. From a decent summer dark sky site (well away from city lights), the bulge is quite easy to spot. As others have stated, the center of our galaxy is invisible to us in “regular” light, do to interstellar dust and crud. Using infrared imaging, we can peer through the crud and look at what is going on in there. However, by just using a decent set of binoculars, the richness of the central area of the galaxy is reveled.
There is too much interstellar dust between us and the galactic centre, it can’t be seen in visible light. Different telescopes (Hubble, Spitzer, Keck I and II, and others) can detect different wavelengths (such as infrared, gamma, xrays, radio, etc.) and so scientists have been able to image the galaxy using different observations and data. The center of the galaxy is in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. The bulge extends above and below the galactic plane by several thousand light years.
It is possible to indirectly see the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. At the center of our galaxy is a large black hole. Black holes cannot be seen because their gravity is so immense that not even light cannot escape. However their is a visble bulge of older stars and dust around the blackhole which leads us to believe that there is indeed a blackhole there.
