Laniakea: Our home supercluster

Published on Sep 3, 2014

Superclusters – regions of space that are densely packed with galaxies – are the biggest structures in the Universe. But scientists have struggled to define exactly where one supercluster ends and another begins. Now, a team based in Hawaii has come up with a new technique that maps the Universe according to the flow of galaxies across space. Redrawing the boundaries of the cosmic map, they redefine our home supercluster and name it Laniakea, which means ‘immeasurable heaven’ in Hawaiian.
siftbotsays...

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, September 4th, 2014 7:48pm PDT - promote requested by RFlagg.

gharksays...

Two things spring to mind:
The dudes that put us in the original (smaller) supercluster must be pretty mad right now
The new definition of what a supercluster is... is simply awesome (pun intended).

nanrodsays...

Then consider it completely awesome since with the scale and perspective presented there's no way you could differentiate the actual elliptical orbits from perfectly circular orbits. Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus all have an eccentricity of about 5% while Neptune's is less than 1%.

kfunksaid:

this was awesome until the circular orbits of our solar system at the end ಠ_ಠ

FlowersInHisHairsays...

I don't know how anybody who is exposed to this knowledge can believe that the universe exists for our benefit alone. There must be life out there somewhere in those billions and billions of galaxies.

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