“Laniakea”, the renowned ‘neighborhood’ of 100,000 galaxies where … – RTVE

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An international team of researchers, led by astronomer R. Brent Tully , University of Hawaii at Manoa (USA) has defined the outline the vast supercluster of galaxies containing our own Milky Way.

These experts have dubbed the supercluster with the name of ‘Laniakea’ , which means “big sky” in Hawaiian, as reported by Article editing Thursday Nature .

The galaxies are not distributed randomly across the universe , but are found in groups, like our own Local Group, which contains dozens of galaxies and massive clusters, which have hundreds of galaxies, all interconnected in a network of filaments that are strung like pearls.

The galaxies are not distributed randomly in the universe

When these filaments intersect, are huge structures, called ” superclusters “, which are interconnected but whose boundaries are poorly defined.

impact on the movement of the galaxy

The researchers propose a new way of evaluating these large-scale structures using the review of its impact on the movement of galaxies . A galaxy between two structures of this type can be trapped in a gravitational tug of war in which the balance of gravitational forces surrounding large-scale structure determines the motion of the galaxy.

By mapping velocities of galaxies along our local universe, this expert team has been able to define the region of space that dominates each supercluster .

The Milky Way lies outside one of these superclusters, whose measure has been mapped for the first time carefully using these new techniques. This supercluster Laniakea is 500 million light diameter years and contains the mass of 1017 suns 100,000 galaxies.

This study clarifies the role of the Great Attractor

This study clarifies the role of the Great Attractor, a problem that has kept astronomers busy for 30 years. Within the volume of the galaxy supercluster ‘Laniakea’ movements are directed inward, like water currents follow paths that descend into the valley.

The region of the Great Attractor is a large valley flat gravitational background with a sphere of attraction that extends through the supercluster Laniakea.

The name was suggested by Laniakea Nawa’a Napoleon , an associate professor of Hawaiian Language and director of the Department of Languages, Linguistics and Literature at ‘Kapiolani Community College’, part of the University System of Hawaii. The name honors Polynesian navigators who used the knowledge of the heavens to travel across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.