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Welcome To Laniakea, Our New Cosmic Home
astroengine writes Using a new mapping technique that takes into account the motions — and not just the distances — of nearby galaxies, astronomers discovered that the Milky Way is located in the suburb of a massive, previously unknown super-cluster they named Laniakea, a term from Hawaiian words meaning "immeasurable heaven." Actually, Laniakea's girth is measurable, though difficult to conceptualize. The super-cluster spans 520 million light-years in diameter, more than five times larger than the cluster previously believed to be the Milky Way's cosmic home.
It replaces the new grouping in much the same way Einstein replaced Newtonian mechanics. It is a more accurate description of our place in the universe, just as relativity is a more accurate description of moving bodies, even if on human scales the two are nearly indistinguishable.
Hell, that's less than 160 MegaParsecs. Not that much bigger than the already-cramped Virgo Supercluster at 33MPa. Still the name is quite nice.
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We've gone from a geocentric model to being part of a galactic super-cluster. It seems to me that our reality is fractal in nature; and it wouldn't surprise me if at every step we find our reality to be a cell of a much larger one.
Analogies are never exact correspondences. They're simply more or less useful. People who replace 'useful' with 'accurate' in that sentence are like a clown car full of lawyers in a fruit flavored hailstorm.
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