Our Milky Way galaxy now has a new address — it lies on the edge of a cosmic supercluster dubbed “Laniakea”!
Astronomers have determined that our Milky Way galaxy is part of a newly identified ginormous supercluster of galaxies, dubbed ‘Laniakea’, which means ‘immense heaven’ in Hawaiian.
The so-called Laniakea Supercluster is 500 million light-years in diameter and contains the mass of one hundred million billion Suns spread across 100,000 galaxies.
“We have finally established the contours that define the supercluster of galaxies we can call home,” said lead researcher R Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
“This is not unlike finding out for the first time that your hometown is actually part of much larger country that borders other nations,” Tully said.
Superclusters are among the largest structures in the known Universe. They are made up of groups, like our own Local Group, that contain dozens of galaxies, and massive clusters that contain hundreds of galaxies, all interconnected in a web of filaments.
