Laniakea Supercluster

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The Laniakea Supercluster or Laniakea for short (; Hawaiian lit. 'immense heaven') is the large-scale structure centered around the Great Attractor that is home to the Milky Way and approximately 100,000 other nearby galaxies. It was originally defined in September 2014 as a galaxy supercluster, when a group of astronomers, including R. Brent Tully of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Hélène Courtois of the University of Lyon, Yehuda Hoffman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Daniel Pomarède of CEA Université Paris-Saclay published a new way of defining superclusters according to the relative velocities of galaxies as basins of attraction. The new definition of the Local Supercluster subsumes the then prior defined Virgo and Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster as appendages, the former being the historical local supercluster. Follow-up studies suggest that the Laniakea is not gravitationally bound. It will disperse rather than continue to maintain itself as an overdensity relative to...

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