- Since its existence was confirmed in 2014, the Laniakea Supercluster has been considered the ultimate cosmic neighborhood, home to the Virgo Supercluster, the Local Cluster, and the good old Milky Way.
- Now, new research suggests that Laniakea itself may be part of a larger structure known as the Basin of Attraction.
- Understanding these cosmic pockets of matter and their influence on the universe (past and present) will provide better data to explore questions of dark matter distribution and cosmic expansion.
The human mind has difficulty understanding how big the universe actually is. For example, consider Earth’s space address. Of course, we are in the Milky Way galaxy. It is in turn part of the Local Cluster, the Virgo Cluster, and the larger Virgo Supercluster, which is 110 million light-years long and contains about 110 galaxies and galaxy clusters. Masu. So if you wanted to traverse a supercluster at the speed of light, and you started your journey in the early Cretaceous period, you would end your journey right now.
This is a pretty big deal, but it’s actually just the beginning. Evidence of other, larger superclusters appearing in the 1980s led scientists to discover an even larger cosmic neighborhood called the Laniakea supercluster. This galaxy contains 100,000 galaxies and is approximately 520 million light-years in diameter. Now, an international research team has discovered that even Laniakea is actually even bigger The “Basin of Attraction” or BOA (known as the Shapley concentration) American scientist Harlow Shapleywho first observed this concentration in the 1930s).
Although a fitting name for a space-themed harlequin romance novel, a gravitational basin is actually a region of space that contains a high concentration of galaxies and galaxy clusters, which act as “attractors” . According to the researchers (following the lambda cold dark matter model), these basins and structures formed from quantum fluctuations during the early stages of the universe’s rapid expansion. These fluctuations formed galaxies and star clusters, which attracted surrounding matter to form the cosmic BOA.
“Our universe is like a giant spider’s web,” said study co-author R. Brent Talley of the University of Hawaii. today’s universe“Galaxies lie along filaments and cluster at nodes where gravity pulls them together. Just as water flows within a basin, galaxies flow within basins of cosmic gravity. Of these larger basins The discovery could fundamentally change our understanding of the structure of the universe.”
Talese’s team is measuring cosmic flows by studying the movements of distant galaxies, and their movements indicate a larger basin (even larger than Laniakea) guiding those flows. There is. However, the Shapley concentration (an astonishing 10 times the volume of Laniakea) half The size of Sloan’s Great Wall, the largest known structure in space. Still feeling unimportant?
“The dominance of the Sloan Wall Basin over the Shapley Basin is really surprising,” said study co-author Yehuda Hoffman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. said Debriefing session. “All previous studies, including ours, suggested that Shapley was a major player.”
Thanks to this detailed view of the Milky Way’s position in the universe, scientists now have a better understanding of the universe’s past and how the gravity of the gravitational basin may influence the evolution of the universe in the future. I can now understand it.
Darren lives in Portland and has a cat. I write/edit about science fiction and how the world works. If you look hard enough, you can find his previous articles on Gizmodo and Paste.
