Laniakea: Our home supercluster (Video)

Youtube ^ | Sep 3, 2014 | Nature Video

[JerseyanExile]

Superclusters – regions of space that are densely packed with galaxies – are the biggest structures in the Universe. But scientists have struggled to define exactly where one supercluster ends and another begins. Now, a team based in Hawaii has come up with a new technique that maps the Universe according to the flow of galaxies across space. Redrawing the boundaries of the cosmic map, they redefine our home supercluster and name it Laniakea, which means ‘immeasurable heaven’ in Hawaiian.

Video Link

[captmar-vell]

I’d be okay with just a small out of the way place in a quiet neighborhood,

[captmar-vell]

3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

Psalm 8:3-5

[2ndDivisionVet]

They also could’ve gone with “Obama” which means ‘immeasurable ineptitude and graft’ in at least four languages; English, Austrian, Indonesian and Swahili.

[VaRepublican]

I have a question. We have been studying galaxy movement for what, about a hundred years? ok maybe more. how do we know they are moving and how do these folks know how much they have moved?

[Bullish]

I don’t need that much space.... Just sayin’

[Bullish]

Now that right there is funny.... good job.

[Bullish]

Now that right there was a video.... I’m sure of it.
Other than that, I’m completely flustered.

[cripplecreek]

Just turned on the TV and there’s a show just starting on the Science Channel about exactly that.

A lot of it has to do with doppler shift and comparison with where things were in relation to us with where they are now.

I’m not fully awake yet so A can’t put things together too well.

[muir_redwoods]

The degree to which the have moved is based upon their red shift. The red shift is a phenomenon first observed by astronomer Edwin Hubble. This link explains it pretty well.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hubble

[left that other site]

Coming to a neighborhood near you!
Ping!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks left that other site, nice extra to APoD members.

[Prospero]

Doppler shift, primarily. But don't let them fool you into thinking they have more figured out than they really do. For most of my life the big debate centered on the expansion of the cosmos and was squarely based on the assumption that the mutual attraction of all this matter was slowing the speed of this expansion. The question that occupied innumerable seminars and retreats was whether the momentum of expansion, all of it set in motion by the Big Bang, was sufficient to overcome this mutual attraction, whether it would slow and eventually collapse.

No one dreamed, let alone speculated, that the methodical study of the doppler shifts of all this structure would show that this expansion was actually speeding up!

And I won't even begin to relate how recent nor how baffling the study of individual galactic rotation has turned out to be, how galaxies turned out to rotate more like solid objects, pointing toward the conclusion that much more of the cosmos is composed of dark rather than visible matter, the nature of which is entirely unknown.

The practitioners of "science" as a religion have much further to go than they dare dream.

[colorado tanker]

Don’t know about the science, but sure is purty.