{"id":204312,"date":"2024-09-27T00:01:07","date_gmt":"2024-09-27T10:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=204312"},"modified":"2024-09-26T13:50:06","modified_gmt":"2024-09-26T23:50:06","slug":"cosmic-neighborhood-may-be-10x-larger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2024\/09\/27\/cosmic-neighborhood-may-be-10x-larger\/","title":{"rendered":"UH<\/abbr> astronomers: Our cosmic neighborhood may be 10x larger"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>
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Galaxy motions converge into colored basins of attraction. The Milky Way is shown as the red dot.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A team of international researchers guided by astronomers at University of Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> Institute for Astronomy<\/a> is challenging our understanding of the universe with groundbreaking findings that suggest our cosmic neighborhood may be far larger than previously thought. The Cosmicflows team has been studying the movements of 56,000 galaxies, revealing a potential shift in the scale of our galactic basin of attraction.<\/p>\n

A decade ago, the team concluded that our galaxy, the Milky Way, resides within a massive basin of attraction called Lani\u0101kea, 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\u2014a region packed with an immense amount of mass and gravitational pull. The findings were recently published in Nature Astronomy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“Our universe is like a giant web, with galaxies lying along filaments and clustering at nodes where gravitational forces pull them together,” said UH<\/abbr> Astronomer R. Brent Tully, one of the study\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n