Laniakea Super Cluster

Taking a necessary break from discussions about Puna lava flows, evacuations, predictions, civil defense strategies to focus on a new discovery...the bigger "home" we share.

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.)