Laniakea Supercluster

And that Local Group is part of something much, much bigger.

It is part of Laniakea, a supercluster.

A supercluster is basically a gigantic neighborhood made up of not just a few galaxies, not just a few hundred galaxies, but 100,000 galaxies all connected, all part of one enormous cosmic culture.

Now, The word Laniakea, it comes from a Hawaiian language and it means immeasurable heaven.

Isn't that just one of the most beautiful names you've ever heard? The people who named it were actually honoring the ancient navigators, the brilliant sailors who thousands of years ago used the stars in the sky to travel across the vast Pacific Ocean and now the same sky has given us a name for our cosmic home.

Goosebumps, genuinely, my lovelies.

One light year is the distance that light, the fastest thing in the entire universe, travels in one whole year.

So light moves so fast it can go around the entire Earth seven times in just one second.

Between these walls of galactic strings, there are obviously voids.

It is thought that our Milky Way galaxy is part of the Laniakea supercluster, causing me to sign my address as 5501 st charles street coddleville missouri 63304 western continent gaia earth soul system b series adjacent milky way galaxy laniakea supercluster universe 7.12 yaldabaoth avenue cosmos b sofia drive But the view here from home is more tricky than the average male man often considers because new measurements are showing that our galaxy is in between typical galactic clusters inside what is known as the KBC void.

What is so controversial about the KBC void is how big it would have to be.

It seems impossible.

They found that our local group belongs to an immense structure, around 500 million light years across, containing something like 100,000 large galaxies, all of them, on this scale, drifting together in the same direction.

They gave it a name from the Hawaiian language, Laniakea, which means immeasurable heaven.

From inside Laniakea, the Milky Way is one galaxy among a hundred thousand.

Laniakea itself is one structure among many more, and all of it is spread through a universe that, as far as we can tell, looks much the same in every direction, filled with galaxies for as far as we are able to see.

Somewhere far behind you, among those countless lights, is one small spiral.

You couldn't point to it now, not from here.

Let the edge of the universe fall behind you.

The ancient light, the fading horizon, the galaxies drifting beyond reach.

In 2014, they officially formally defined this gargantuan structure.

And they named it the Laniakea Supercluster, which translates from Hawaiian to immense heaven.

It is an immense heaven indeed.

And in this new dynamic map of the watershed, the Great Attractor isn't just a random heavy spot in Laniakea.

A temporary, fleeting focal point of matter interacting in a brief window of cosmic time before dark energy completely isolates the macro structures of the universe.

And that leads to a haunting but deeply beautiful thought to leave you with.

Since the Laniakea supercluster will be fundamentally torn apart, the constituent galaxies will become isolated, lonesome islands adrift in an ever-expanding, completely dark ocean.

An ocean of emptiness.