Scientists using new tools to redraw the cosmic map showing our small corner of a wider universe have identified the cluster of galaxies that interacts with our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and have given the supercluster a name.
They have dubbed our cosmic neighborhood "Laniakea," from the Hawaiian for "immense heaven."
The supercluster, as vast as it is, may be just a portion of an even larger cosmic structure that is not completely defined yet, says lead study author astronomer Brent Tully from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
"We live in something called 'the cosmic web,' where galaxies are connected in tendrils separated by giant voids," he says.
Galaxies, instead of being uniformly spread out in space, tend to come together and gather in groups like the Local Group that includes our Milky Way.
These groups then come together in giant clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, interconnected with filaments of galaxies strung across space like a string of pearls.
Tully and research colleagues, using a giant database of the motions exhibited by galaxies, have created a 3D map showing that our Milky Way home sits on the outskirts of the newly-named Laniakea Supercluster.
This supercluster, which spans around 520 million light years, contains around 100,000 galaxies.
They decided it needed a memorable name, the researcher say.
"We live in the Local Group, which is part of the Local Sheet next to the Local Void -- we wanted to come up with something a little more exciting than 'Local,'" Tully says.
Hawaiian language teacher Nawa'a Napoleon from Kapiolani Community College in Hawaii suggested Laniakea, to honor the Polynesian navigators who made long voyages across the immense spaces of the Pacific Ocean using their knowledge of the heavens.
Even as we now have a name for our local "neighborhood," there's a need for further refinement of the map and of our knowledge of our home supercluster, which may be portion of something even larger, Tully says.
The giant cosmic structures existing throughout the universe have boundaries that are often unclear and difficult to nail down, he says.
"We probably need to measure to another factor of three in distance to explain our local motion," he says. "We might find that we have to come up with another name for something larger than we're a part of -- we're entertaining that as a real possibility."
