Discovery of super galaxy 'neighbor' of the Milky Way

Astronomers have released a new three-dimensional map showing the Milky Way's location in the universe. The Milky Way's neighbor on the map is a region of galaxies with hundreds of quadrillions of suns that stretches 500 million light years across.

The Milky Way, meanwhile, spans just 100,000 light years and contains only about 100 billion suns, including Earth's Sun. The solar system is about 28,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way.

Astronomers have named the newly discovered supergalaxies Laniakea, which means "infinite heaven" in Hawaiian, and our own Milky Way lies quite close to the edge of the supergalaxies.

"We have established the boundaries of the super-galactic universe. It's like your hometown is part of a larger country that shares borders with other countries."

For years, astronomers have noticed that galaxies are clustered together throughout the universe, forming a web of countless galaxies or supergalaxies that resemble dewdrops on a spider’s web interspersed with vast voids. The supergalaxies mentioned above are just one of many “dewdrops” in the observable universe that stretches over 90 billion light years.

Although maps of our Milky Way neighborhood have been made before, they have been vague because they do not show how far these regions extend and which galaxies are held together by gravity.

This time, astronomers used a new method to map the limits of the supergalactic sphere, pinpointing the precise locations of its 8,000 member galaxies by measuring their speeds relative to the expansion of the universe.

These new data show that thousands of galaxies have migrated to a single point of attraction at the center of the supercluster. This strange event has complicated efforts to map our galactic neighbors.

But with this new map of the universe, astronomers have discovered something even more amazing: our Milky Way may be part of an unknown but certainly very grand structure of the universe.

According to Vietnamnet