Galactic Bulge Simulator

The galactic bulge is the dense, roughly spherical swarm of old stars packed around the center of a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, sitting apart from the thin rotating disk around it. This simulator builds a bulge from a Sérsic density profile — the same function astronomers fit to real bulge light profiles — and computes how fast a star orbiting at any radius would move, given both the bulge's own mass and a central supermassive black hole. Drag the probe radius outward from the black hole to watch orbital speed rise steeply near the center and settle into the calmer disk-dominated speeds further out, and adjust the black hole mass, Sérsic concentration and bulge-to-disk ratio to see how each reshapes the star cloud and its rotation curve.