The Milky Way’s new home: Laniakea

Analysis of galaxies shows local supercluster to be 100 times larger than previously thought.

 

The supercluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way has been found to be 100 times bigger in volume and mass than previously thought. The enormous region near the Milky Way has been mapped with newer precion and found that the supercluster that the Milky Way resides in is so much bigger than anyone believe and they the named it Laniakea, which is Hawaiian for ‘immeasurable heaven’.

The new study, which was published in Nature, describes a novel way to define where one supercluster ends and another begins. A team led by Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, charted the motions of galaxies to infer the gravitational landscape of the local Universe, and redraw its map.

See Nature for the full story:

http://www.nature.com/news/earth-s-new-address-solar-system-milky-way-laniakea-1.15819