Waspie_Dwarf Posted September 4, 2014 #1 Share Posted September 4, 2014 Hawaii scientist maps and names Laniakea, our home supercluster of galaxies University of Hawai'i at Manoa astronomer R. Brent Tully, who recently shared the 2014 Gruber Cosmology Prize and the 2014 Victor Ambartsumian International Prize, has led an international team of astronomers in defining the contours of the immense supercluster of galaxies containing our own Milky Way. They have named the supercluster "Laniakea," meaning "immense heaven" in Hawaiian. The paper explaining this work is the cover story of the September 4 issue of the prestigious journal Nature.Galaxies are not distributed randomly throughout the universe. Instead, they are found in groups, like our own Local Group, that contain dozens of galaxies, and in massive clusters containing hundreds of galaxies, all interconnected in a web of filaments in which galaxies are strung like pearls. Where these filaments intersect, we find huge structures, called "superclusters." These structures are interconnected, but they have poorly defined boundaries. Read more... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taun Posted September 4, 2014 #2 Share Posted September 4, 2014 (edited) I got the impression from watching the video in the story that all 100,000 galaxies (or at least the vast majority of them) are moving in toward what looks like a single point... (The Great Attractor?) If that is so, will there be some "Cosmic Compression" some time billions of years in the future? a single extremely massive "super galaxy" rather like Pangea was on Earth... Or did I misunderstand the graphics... Edited September 4, 2014 by Taun Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waspie_Dwarf Posted September 4, 2014 Author #3 Share Posted September 4, 2014 Or did I misunderstand the graphics... That's certainly what the graphics implied, however I don't believe this is actually the case. The convergence is, I believe, a statistical effect. The galaxies are all red-shifted so are moving away from each other. However this red shift is not uniform. There is something unseen pulling on the galaxies and slowing them. This is the Great Attractor. What I think the graphic was showing (but didn't explain well) is the direction of this attractive force and also the direction of attractive forces for other superclusters. If I am correct in my understanding there will be no "Cosmic Compression". Here is what wiki has to say on it: The Great Attractor is a gravity anomaly in intergalactic space within the range of the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster that reveals the existence of a localized concentration of mass tens of thousands times that of the Milky Way. This mass is observable by its effect on the motion of galaxies and their associated clusters over a region hundreds of millions of light-years across.These galaxies are all redshifted, in accordance with the Hubble Flow, indicating that they are receding relative to us and to each other, but the variations in their redshift are sufficient to reveal the existence of the anomaly. Source: wikipedia 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taun Posted September 4, 2014 #4 Share Posted September 4, 2014 Okay... That makes sense - thanks... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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