Where is the Milky Way? We live there and we know that its name comes from Greek mythology about the goddess Hera who sprayed milk in the sky.
Zeus, the god of thunder, placed the baby Hercules, born to a mortal woman, on Hera’s breast while she slept so that the baby would drink her milk and become immortal. Hera wakes up while breastfeeding and realizes that she is nursing an unknown baby. When she pushes the baby away, some of the milk spills out, creating a band of light known as the Milky Way, according to mythology.
But until now we didn’t know where it was, given the fact that it’s just one galaxy among billions of galaxies in the universe.
Looking back at how astronomy has developed theories over time, we see how astronomers and philosophers struggled to understand the nature of galaxies and the vastness of the universe.
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our solar system, and its name refers to the galaxy’s appearance from Earth, the misty band of light visible in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be distinguished individually without a powerful telescope. I am.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, with spiral arms only about 1,000 light-years thick and a bulge even thicker. Recent simulations suggest that the dark matter region, which also includes some visible stars, could extend up to about 2 million light-years in diameter. The Milky Way has several satellite galaxies and is part of the Local Group of galaxies, forming part of the Virgo Supercluster, which itself is a component of the Laniakea Supercluster. It has become.
Astrophysicists believe it contains between 100 billion and 400 billion stars and at least that many planets.
history of discovery
Galileo Galilei was the first to use a telescope to resolve bands of light into individual stars in 1610. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought the Milky Way contained all the stars in the universe, but they were far off.
In 1929, American astronomer Edwin Hubble used the largest telescope of the time to provide the first observational evidence that the age of the universe is finite: the farther galaxies are from Earth, the faster they recede into space. I discovered that it looks like. (The universe is expanding uniformly in all directions) The Milky Way is just one galaxy among many.
Hubble was thanked by Albert Einstein for his contributions to theory. Since then, Hubble’s name has been honored as a powerful space telescope.
Now, an international study involving scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has revealed a gravitational “basin of attraction” in the local universe, providing new insights into the large-scale cosmic structures that shape the movement of galaxies.
They have just published their findings in the prestigious journal Nature Astronomy under the title “Identification of Basins of Attraction in the Local Universe.”
Using advanced data from Cosmicflows-4, which compiles the distances and velocities of nearly 56,000 galaxies, the researchers applied cutting-edge algorithms to detect gravity-dominated galaxies such as the Sloan Great Wall and the Shapley Supercluster. identified a specific area. This study suggests that our Milky Way most likely exists within the larger Shapley Basin, and expands our understanding of the role of megastructures in shaping cosmic flow and cosmic evolution. It will change your understanding.
Team members said they identified a key gravitational region known as a “gravitational basin,” an important step in understanding the vast structure of the universe. They argued that it is important because it improves our understanding of the large-scale structure of the universe and the gravity that shapes it.
By mapping gravitational basins, or regions where gravity pulls on galaxies and matter, researchers hope to uncover how massive cosmic structures influence the movement and formation of galaxies over time. continued.
“Understanding these dynamics not only helps us better understand the past and ongoing evolution of the universe, but also helps us understand fundamental cosmological questions such as the distribution of dark matter and the forces driving the expansion of the universe. “This knowledge has the potential to improve our cosmological models and guide future astronomical research.”
The research was led by Dr. A. Valade of the Liebnitz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam during his doctoral tenure, under the supervision of Professor Yehuda Hoffmann of the Hebrew University and Professor Noam Libeskind of Potsdam, and was led by Dr. A. Valade of the Liebnitz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam during his doctoral tenure, and under the supervision of Professor Yehuda Hoffmann of the Hebrew University and Professor Noam Libeskind of Potsdam. There were also contributions from -Saklay and University of Hawaii.
The study is based on the widely accepted standard model of lambda cold dark matter cosmology, which suggests that the large-scale structure of the universe emerged from quantum fluctuations during the early stages of cosmic inflation. These minute fluctuations in density evolved to form the galaxies and star clusters we observe today. As these density perturbations increased, they attracted surrounding matter, creating a region where a minimum of gravitational potential, or basin of attraction, formed.
Previous catalogs suggested that the Milky Way was part of a region called the Laniakea supercluster, but the new CF4 data provides a slightly different view, suggesting that Laniakea contains a much larger volume. This indicates that it may be part of the larger Shapley Basin. of the local universe.
Among the newly identified regions, the Sloan Great Wall stands out as the largest and most attractive basin, with a volume of approximately 500 million cubic light years, more than twice that of the Shapley Basin, previously thought to be the largest. It is the size of These discoveries provide an unprecedented investigation into the gravitational landscape of the local universe and provide new insights into how galaxies and cosmic structures evolve and interact over time.
