Laniakea Supercluster

The basin of about 100,000 galaxies whose motions all flow toward one attractor, near the Great Attractor; the Milky Way sits near its edge. Tully et al. (2014) found it and named it, Hawaiian for 'immeasurable heaven'. Valade et al. (2024) find it may be one lobe of a larger basin around Shapley.

Its outline is the watershed Dupuy and Courtois (2023) traced through the Cosmicflows-4 velocity field, reconstructed from the measured distances of about 56,000 galaxies on a grid of 37-million-light-year cells, so its edges are approximate. Distances use this map's Planck Hubble constant; on Cosmicflows' own they are a tenth smaller. The threads are streamlines of the same field, the paths matter is moving along; their moving dashes show which way, not how fast.

Across

about 745 million ly

End to end

1.29 billion ly

Attractor

355 million ly from the Sun

Mass

100,000 trillion Suns

The Laniakea Supercluster or Laniakea for short is the large-scale structure centered around the Great Attractor that is home to the Milky Way and approximately 100,000 other nearby galaxies. It was originally defined in September 2014 as a galaxy supercluster, when a group of astronomers, including R.

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