I was wondering how come we can’t see the center of our galaxy. Pictures of other spiral galaxies seem to have dense bright centers, and if we’re hanging out on one of the spiral bands, it would seem like we would see alot of light if we stood on earth and looked toward the center of the Milky Way. Do those bright dense centers only look that way from immense distances?
We can see it. It’s the Milky Way.
Forget about my previous post. I didn’t pay enough attention to your question.
Well, clairobscur, your answer wasn’t entirely wrong. The Milky Way is in fact denser in the (Northern hemisphere) summer sky, when we look toward the center of the galaxy. However, we don’t see the really bright galactic center because of intervening gas and dust. We can’t see the forest for the trees. Or maybe a better analogy would be, we can’t see the forest because of patchy ground fog.
You can see the center. Here’s a picture: http://www.allthesky.com/nebulae/big/mwop-b.jpg
What is messing up what you expect to see are intervening dust clouds (fairly obvious) but you can make out the central galactic bulge in the picture with only a little imagination.
Here is a picture of the galaxy in the infrared spectrum that shows the central bulge a bit better. The dust clouds do not block this wavelength as completely as it does visible light.
I mean “fairly obvious” in that you can see it in the picture. Not that it is “fairly obvious” as in everyone should know that.
There’s too much dust in the way to see the center of the milky way with visible light.You can see it better at X-Ray, Infrared and Radio frequencies. Here’s an infrared closeup of the innermost lightyear of the Milky way, including the location of its’ 2 million solar-mass black hole.