Scientists Thought the Milky Way Was Part of Laniakea. It Turns Out That an Even Larger Superstructure Controls Its Movements

Could the Milky Way be just a small part of a much larger and more complex cosmic structure than previously thought? After running modern algorithms on the most comprehensive astronomical database, that’s precisely what scientists believe.

Summary. The latest data suggests that our galaxy, the Milky Way, may be part of a much larger cosmic structure than scientists previously thought. This finding promises to redefine the scientific community’s understanding of the universe and further emphasize humans are just a very small part of it.

The new map of the nearby universe. In 2014, a group of astronomers led by Brent Tully of the University of Hawaii discovered Laniakea, a supercluster of 100,000 galaxies that house the Milky Way. At the time, the team published its findings in Nature.

Laniakea stretches out more than 500 million light-years, which is quite impressive. However, recent data collected by Tully and his colleagues suggests that the Milky Way is located within an even larger structure known as the Shapley Concentration (or Shapley Supercluster).

Welcome to Shapley. If astronomers were to expand their field of view, they would eventually encounter the “supergalactic shot.” In it, they would see the largest concentration of matter in the Earth’s nearby universe.

The Shapley basin of attraction is a massive collection of galaxy clusters that exert gravitational influence on other enormous structures in the vicinity. Like the Sloan Great Wall, this region has gravitational force over the entire cosmic neighborhood.

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Image | NASA

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