Laniakea, described in the journal Nature, stretches some
500 million light years across and holds 100,000 galaxies with the mass of a
hundred million billion suns. This
super cluster, scientists said, provides a whole new lens on the mysterious
internal dynamics of such giant clusters, the biggest structures in the
universe.
Laniakea is the galaxy supercluster that is home to the
Milky Way, the Solar System and Earth. It was defined in September 2014, when a
group of astronomers led by R. Brent Tully of the University of Hawaii
published a new way of defining superclusters according to the relative
velocities of galaxies.
The name Laniakea means "immeasurable heaven" in
Hawaiian, from "lani" for 'heaven' and "akea" for
'spacious' or 'immeasurable'. The name was suggested by Nawa'a Napoleon, an
associate professor of Hawaiian Language at Kapiolani Community College. The
name honors Polynesian navigators who used heavenly knowledge to navigate the
Pacific Ocean.
(Information was gleaned from a variety of sources including LA Times, Nature Magazine and Wikipedia. I adapted a photograph to black and white for good contrast.)
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