Our cosmic neighborhood may be 10x larger | Science & Technology

A decade ago, the team concluded that our galaxy, the Milky Way, resides within a massive basin of attraction called Laniākea, stretching 500 million light-years across. However, new data suggests that this understanding may only scratch the surface. There is now a 60% probability that we are part of an even grander structure, potentially 10 times larger in volume, centered on the Shapley concentration — a region packed with an immense amount of mass and gravitational pull. The findings were recently published in Nature Astronomy.

“Our universe is like a giant web, with galaxies lying along filaments and clustering at nodes where gravitational forces pull them together,” said UH Astronomer R. Brent Tully, one of the study’s lead researchers. “Just as water flows within watersheds, galaxies flow within cosmic basins of attraction. The discovery of these larger basins could fundamentally change our understanding of cosmic structure.”

Vast cosmos

The universe’s origins date back 13 billion years when tiny differences in density began to shape the cosmos, growing under the influence of gravity into the vast structures we see today. But if our galaxy is part of a basin of attraction much larger than Laniākea, which means immense heaven in the Hawaiian language, it would suggest that the initial seeds of cosmic structure grew far beyond current models.

“This discovery presents a challenge: our cosmic surveys may not yet be large enough to map the full extent of these immense basins,” said UH astronomer and co-author Ehsan Kourkchi. “We are still gazing…