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“Laniakea” is Hawaiian for “Immeasurable Heaven”, and it’s the name given to the newly-discovered (or newly-defined) supercluster of which our Milky Way is one member. Cosmologists had previously put the Milky Way in the smaller Virgo supercluster about 100,000,000 ly. But Laniakea is much larger, at 500,000,000 ly (think of it: ~1/24th of the visible universe). I’d always visualized “superclusters” in a kind of nebulous way (forgive the pun) as a roughly circular glob. But the new work shows a much more complicated, spidery, extended, and subjectively “elegant” structure. Laniakea is pretty.

I first heard about it in an article in the Guardian, Milky Way is on the outskirts of ‘immeasurable heaven’ supercluster, reviewing an article in Nature behind a paywall but with a summary here.

But what brought it home for me was an accompanying YouTube video that shows the newly-mapped structure and rotates it in three dimensions, which makes it possible to grasp the structure in a way that a flat 2D rendering can’t. I didn’t use our embedded YouTube player this time because I think you really need to view the native YouTube version at full screen. It’s pretty impressive.

I love cosmology. I love the feel of my skull cracking every time cosmologists demand that I expand my brain to try to encompass ever grander concepts.

And I like the name “Immeasurable Heaven”. People who think that scientists can’t be poets have probably never encountered a real scientist.