New Map of the Milky Way Shows Exactly Where Our Galaxy Lies; Region Named 'Laniakea,' or 'Immeasurable Heaven' [PHOTO]
Scientists have created a new map that shows where our galaxy lies in relation to thousands of other galaxies for the first time. The map shows the Milky Way as located on the fringes of the newly named Laniakea supercluster, which means "immeasurable heaven" in Hawaiian.
According to National Geographic, Laniakea includes roughly 100,000 galaxies and spans 500 million light-years in diameter. The scientists who created the map think that Laniakea could even be part of a larger structure that is currently undefined. This is quite possible, as the newly found supercluster is just a small slice of the visible universe, which extends over 90 billion light-years.
Brent Tully, an author of the study describing the supercluster, stated, "We live in something called the cosmic web, where galaxies are connected in tendrils separated by giant voids," further depicting the relationship of the Milky Way to Laniakea. He went on to say, "Seeing a map gives you a further sense of place... For me, having that sense of place and seeing the relationship of things is very important in terms of understanding it."
Maps of the Milky Way have been made before, but none were able to identify which galaxies were bound together in order to form the Milky Way's supercluster. This is likely because the process was extremely difficult. After much hard work, scientists were able to determine the connection of the Milky Way to the supercluster by measuring the cosmic flow of the galaxies. In order to do this, the scientists subtracted cosmic expansion in order to see the galaxies' gravitational pull.
David Schlegel, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, stated, "It's a really difficult observation to make, per galaxy...A lot of people of people actually worked on it, but it was such a mess that essentially all of them gave up...This group, Tully in particular, has persevered and kept working on it."
The scientists wrote their findings in the September 4th issue of the journal "Nature."