14 DAY TRIAL // In a paper published in the journal Nature this September 4, scientists explain that, according to evidence obtained with the help of telescopes, our home galaxy is part and parcel of a galactic supercluster.
This supercluster of galaxies is so big that the researchers who documented its existence saw fit to name it “Laniakea,” which is Hawaiian for “immense heaven.”
As detailed in the journal Nature, galactic superclusters are some of the largest structures to have until now been documented by scientists in the entire universe.
They comprise bundles of hundreds of galaxies that are all interconnected. These groups are known as clusters, and studies have shown that, although it is possible to tell them apart, their boundaries are not very well defined.
In turn, galactic clusters are made up of smaller groups comprising merely a few dozen galaxies, scientists explain. In fact, the makeup of the universe is not all that different to the geography of one country or another.
“We have finally established the contours that define the supercluster of galaxies we can call home,” researcher R. Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said in a statement.
“This is not unlike finding out for the first time that your hometown is actually part of much larger country that borders other nations,” the researcher went on to comment on the outcome of this investigation.
It is estimated that Laniakea, the galactic supercluster that accommodates for our home galaxy, measures well over 500 million light-years across. What's more, the supercluster is said to contain the mass of 100 million billion Suns.
The scientists behind this research project say that this mass is distributed across as many as 100,000 galaxies, the Milky Way included. In case anyone was wondering, the Milky Way sits in the outskirts of this supercluster.
Scientists with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US and their colleagues explain that, in order to document the existence of Laniakea, they used telescopes to map the motion of the galaxies that form it. This motion is influenced by gravitational forces birthed by structures near them.
All in all, the scientists analyzed the velocities of as many as 8,000 distinct galaxies. Data obtained in this manner made it possible for them to better understand the gravitational landscape of the nearby universe, and redraw its map.
The method that scientists employed to document the existence of Laniakea is detailed in the first of the two videos available below. The second video details the galatic supercluster's anatomy and Earth's newly discovered location in the universe.
