With this Hawaiian name, which means "immense sky" , an international team of researchers has named the outline of the enormous supercluster of galaxies that makes up our own Milky Way. The study has been published on the cover of the journal Nature .
The scientists, led by the astronomer R. Brent Tully, from the University of Hawaii (USA) thus define the zone of 500 million light years in diameter with a mass of 10 to 17 suns in 100,000 galaxies , in which, in a tiny part, we humans live.
How has "Laniakea" been delimited? To begin with, galaxies are not randomly distributed in the universe, but rather are distributed in groups, as is our own, the so-called Local Group, which contains a multitude of interconnected galaxies. Also, in massive clusters, where we can find hundreds and hundreds of galaxies, we can see that they are connected by a network of filaments. When these intersect, we have a "supercluster of galaxies", very difficult to delimit.
Thus, thanks to a new way of evaluating these macrostructures on a large scale by examining their impact on the motions of galaxies , astronomers have been able to define the region of space that dominates each supercluster in the universe.
