University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomer R. Brent Tully, who recently
shared the 2014 Gruber Cosmology Prize and the 2014 Victor Ambartsumian
International Prize, has led an international team of astronomers in
defining the contours of the immense supercluster of galaxies containing
our own Milky Way. They have named the supercluster “Laniakea,” meaning
“immense heaven” in Hawaiian. The paper explaining this work is the
cover story of the September 4 issue of the prestigious journal Nature.
Galaxies are not distributed randomly throughout the universe.
Instead, they are found in groups, like our own Local Group, that
contain dozens of galaxies, and in massive clusters containing hundreds
of galaxies, all interconnected in a web of filaments in which galaxies
are strung like pearls. Where these filaments intersect, we find huge
structures, called “superclusters.” These structures are interconnected,
but they have poorly defined boundaries.
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