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Laniakea supercluster

Drone

Drone

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Sep 1, 2010
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Scientists have created the first map of a colossal supercluster of galaxies known as Laniakea, the home of Earth's Milky Way galaxy and many other.

The scientists suggest that Laniakea may even be part of a still-larger structure they have not fully defined yet.

laniakea-galaxy-supercluster-art.jpg


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Now just imagine how tiny we are

Milky Way galaxy resides in the outskirts of the Laniakea Supercluster, which is about 520 million light-years wide. The supercluster is made up of about 100000 galaxies with a total mass about 100 million billion times that of the sun.
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My head hurts. Here's the video

 
Discounting cosmic expansion, their map shows flow lines down which galaxies creep under the effect of gravity in their local region (see video). Based on this, the team defines the edge of a supercluster as the boundary at which these flow lines diverge. On one side of the line, galaxies flow towards one gravitational centre; beyond it, they flow towards another. “It’s like water dividing at a watershed, where it flows either to the left or right of a height of land,” says Tully.
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interesting
 
Incredible and beautiful too. So much to try to understand. When I was growing up the schools taught us that the Universe started in a Big Bang and has been expanding ever since but slowing the expansion due to gravity but now we are told that the expansion of the Universe is actually accelerating. I can't reconcile gravity with increasing speed of expansion. It seems like for the expansion of the Universe to be accelerating implies that there was more energy released in the Big Bang than the Big Bang itself.
 
Another great discovery:

eso1438a.jpg


Scientists studied 93 quasars that were known to form huge groupings spread over billions of light-years, seen at a time when the Universe was about one third of its current age.

Some of the quasars’ rotation axes were aligned with each other - despite the fact that these quasars are separated by billions of light years.

The new VLT results indicate that the rotation axes of the quasars tend to be parallel to the large-scale structures in which they find themselves. So, if the quasars are in a long filament then the spins of the central black holes will point along the filament. The researchers estimate that the probability that these alignments are simply the result of chance is <1%.
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That alignment is kinda spooky, isn't it?
 
It does look a bit like an outline of a skull.
 
So Milky Way is nothing but piece of dust in the Laniakea supercluster but here's something cool:

The 46 billion pixel picture of the Milky Way. It is the largest astronomical image of all time 194 GB file

No, you can't download it :P But scientists created online tool!

http://gds.astro.rub.de/

Using that tool any interested person can view the complete ribbon of the Milky Way at a glance, or zoom in and inspect specific areas. An input window, which provides the position of the displayed image section, can be used to search for specific objects. If the user types in "Eta Carinae", for example, the tool moves to the respective star; the search term "M8" leads to the lagoon nebula.
 
They need to upload that to Elite Dangerous.....
 
3D visualization of Milky Way's local architecture

It's an interactive tool to show the distribution (cosmography) of O and B stars in the solar neighborhood.

If you have fast interwebz click here but if your interwebz is slow click here

It's 3D, you can use your mouse scroll to zoom in/out or grab it to rotate
 
We thought we knew it all but maaaaan there's an elephant in the room and the fucker laughs at us ...

Despite being just 250 million ly from us the new galaxies had been hidden from view until now by our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Hundreds of hidden nearby galaxies have been studied for the first time, shedding light on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor.
We don't actually understand what's causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it's coming from. We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at > 2 million km/h.

Using the multibeam receiver, astronomers were able to see through the stars and dust of our Galaxy, into a previously unexplored region of space known to astronomers as the Zone of Avoidance. “We found 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before,” said team member Prof. Lister Staveley-Smith.



 
Drone said:
Zone of Avoidance.
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I have one of these in my corner of the kitchen....:)



Thanks for finding and sharing these @Drone they are a real treat for the eye and the brain. Epic stuff.
 
Great news:

A spectacular new image of the Milky Way has been released to mark the completion of the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL). The APEX telescope in Chile has mapped the full area of the Galactic Plane visible from the southern hemisphere for the first time at submillimeter wavelengths. The pioneering 12-m APEX telescope allows astronomers to study the cold Universe: gas and dust only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero.

eso1606c.jpg


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The new ATLASGAL maps cover an area of sky > 4 times larger than the first ATLASGAL release. The new maps are also of higher quality, as some areas were re-observed to obtain a more uniform data quality over the whole survey area.

Here's the old 2009 version

eso0924a.jpg


And here's the new one: (it's pretty long, just click to enlarge)

eso1606a.jpg



ATLASGAL provides exciting insights into where the next generation of high-mass stars and clusters form. By combining these with observations from Planck, we can now obtain a link to the large-scale structures of giant molecular clouds.

And videos:


 
64K said:
... When I was growing up the schools taught us that the Universe started in a Big Bang and has been expanding ever since but slowing the expansion due to gravity but now we are told that the expansion of the Universe is actually accelerating. I can't reconcile gravity with increasing speed of expansion. It seems like for the expansion of the Universe to be accelerating implies that there was more energy released in the Big Bang than the Big Bang itself.
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The reason for your confusion - you re not the only one with that problem incl. astronomers/physicist btw - is "dark energy".

Up until around 7 billion years ago the expansion of the universe seems to have slowed down do to gravity. But around that point in time the volume of the exanding universe reached a tipping point were mass/energy density became low enough (gravitational influence), that the dark energy took over. This so called dark energy is pushing everything apart (Big Rip) working in the opposite direction of gravity. The nature of that "dark" energy is unkown only effects can be observed (e.g. accelerated expansion) similar to dark matter .

 
What if there is no dark energy and it's just a vacuum, sucking us in to it's nothingness?
 
Folterknecht said:
You re trolling right?!
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It's called hypothesising, something all great minds do.
I suppose you prefer to believe everything you read without thinking.
 
Caring1 said:
What if there is no dark energy and it's just a vacuum, sucking us in to it's nothingness?
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Dark energy is not really sucking, rather it's pushing distant objects apart ... it's present everywhere like gravity but opposite in two effects: pushing away instead of attracting and gets relatively stronger than gravity in the distance because gravity gets super weak in huge distances and dark energy forces stay the same.
 
Before you hypothesise make sure to get your basics right. Last time I checked a vacuum doesnt magically make things disappear.
 
The center of our Milky Way galaxy lies ~ 27 000 ly away in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. At its core is a black hole ~ 4 million solar masses in size. Around the black hole is a donut-shaped structure ~ 8 ly across that rings the inner volume of neutral gas and thousands of individual stars. Around that, stretching out to ~ 700 ly, is a dense zone of activity called the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). It contains almost 80% of all the dense gas in the galaxy - a reservoir of tens of millions of solar masses of material - and hosts giant molecular clouds and massive star forming clusters of luminous stars, among other regions many of which are poorly understood. For example, the CMZ contains many dense molecular clouds that would normally be expected to produce new stars, but which are instead eerily desolate. It also contains gas moving at highly supersonic velocities - hundreds of km/s. Where did the CMZ come from? No place else in the Milky Way is remotely like it (although there may be analogues in other galaxies). How does it retain its structure as its molecular gas moves, and how do those rapid motions determine its evolution? One difficulty facing astronomers is that there is so much obscuring dust between us and the CMZ that visible light is extinguished by factors of over a trillion. Infrared, radio, and some X-ray radiation can penetrate the veil, however, and they have allowed astronomers to develop the picture just outlined.

su201609.jpg


Dense gas is shown in red, and warm and cold dust in green and blue respectively.
 
Astronomers say they've found the BIGGEST structure in the universe and they named it the BOSS

A supercluster of galaxies > 1 billion ly across??!! What the actual fuck :eek:

The BOSS is big. Really big. Yuuuuuge.

Not this one :p

fZbzK8L.png


So big that when a star is born on one side of the BOSS, it takes a billion years for the light to reach the other side.

The BOSS Great Wall, lurking 4.5-6.5 billion ly away, is an immense complex comprising > 830 galaxies and weighing 10000 times as much as the Milky Way.

 
Cosmic Web, a new project by cosmologists at Northeastern's Center for Complex Network Research, used data from 24000 galaxies to construct multiple models of the cosmic web, offering complex blueprints for how galaxies fit together.

These three interactive visualizations help us imagine the cosmic web, show us differences between the models, and give us insight into the fundamental structure of the Universe.

 
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