galactic bulge

central feature/region of a spiral galaxy

In the Vinony graph

Vinony's link graph records 425 inbound references to galactic bulge, and connects out to luminous infrared galaxy, starburst galaxy and interacting galaxy.

It is catalogued under the topic Galaxies.

Vinony links it to 30 Wikipedia language editions.

Wikidata facts

Part of: spiral galaxy
Image: Artist's impression of the central bulge of the Milky Way.jpg

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Commons category: Bulges

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Encyclopedic overview

Artist's impression of the central bulge of the Milky Way

In astronomy, a galactic bulge (or simply bulge) is a tightly packed group of stars within a larger star formation. The term almost exclusively refers to the group of stars found near the center of most spiral galaxies. Bulges were historically thought to be elliptical galaxies that happened to have a disk of stars around them, but high-resolution images using the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed that many bulges lie at the heart of a spiral galaxy. It is now thought that there are at least two types of bulges: bulges that are like ellipticals and bulges that are like spiral galaxies.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “galactic bulge” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.