But we now have one for our own home supercluster — and that's certainly a start. Further watching: There's an excellent video from Nature breaking down the team's findings. The stills above come from that video. Further reading: Over at Slate, Phil Plait has a nice breakdown of the study, which was released in September Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. A new study in Nature finds that the Milky Way is part of a broader supercluster of , galaxies known as Laniakea. Laniakea contains more than , galaxies, stretches million light years across, and looks something like this the Milky Way is just a speck located on one of its fringes on the right : Say hello to Laniakea, our local supercluster Nature Video, based on Tully et al It's hard to wrap one's head around how enormous this is.
The galaxies around us are moving in identifiable patterns Galaxies moving away from us are in red, those moving toward us in blue Nature Video, based on Tully et al That, in turn, let them create a map of the pathways along which all the galaxies are moving and demarcate some boundaries. There's an especially dense region called "The Great Attractor" in red that's slowly pulling the Milky Way and many other galaxies toward it: Many galaxies in Laniakea are being pulled toward the "Great Attractor" Nature Video, based on Tully et al What's interesting is that this structure is much bigger than anyone had realized.
And the scientists defined the borders as where the galaxies are consistently diverging: Laniakea borders another supercluster: Perseus-Pisces Nature Video, based on Tully et al What happens if we zoom out even further? If galaxies were all the same size, that would give us 10 thousand billion billion or 10 sextillion stars in the observable universe. All the stars, planets, comets, sea otters, black holes and dung beetles together represent less than 5 percent of the stuff in the universe.
About 27 percent of the remainder is dark matter, and 68 percent is dark energy, neither of which are even remotely understood. At least not yet. Human understanding of what the universe is, how it works and how vast it is has changed over the ages. For countless lifetimes, humans had little or no means of understanding the universe. Our distant ancestors instead relied upon myth to explain the origins of everything.
Because our ancestors themselves invented them, the myths reflect human concerns, hopes, aspirations or fears rather than the nature of reality. Several centuries ago, however, humans began to apply mathematics, writing and new investigative principles to the search for knowledge. Those principles were refined over time, as were scientific tools, eventually revealing hints about the nature of the universe.
Since then, our knowledge of the universe has repeatedly leapt forward. It was only about a century ago that astronomers first observed galaxies beyond our own, and only a half-century has passed since humans first began sending spacecraft to other worlds. In the span of a single human lifetime, space probes have voyaged to the outer solar system and sent back the first up-close images of the four giant outermost planets and their countless moons; rovers wheeled along the surface on Mars for the first time; humans constructed a permanently crewed, Earth-orbiting space station; and the first large space telescopes delivered jaw-dropping views of more distant parts of the cosmos than ever before.
In the early 21st century alone, astronomers discovered thousands of planets around other stars, detected gravitational waves for the first time and produced the first image of a black hole. With ever-advancing technology and knowledge, and no shortage of imagination, humans continue to lay bare the secrets of the cosmos.
New insights and inspired notions aid in this pursuit, and also spring from it. We have yet to send a space probe to even the nearest of the billions upon billions of other stars in the galaxy.
In short, most of the universe that can be known remains unknown. The universe is nearly 14 billion years old, our solar system is 4. In other words, the universe has existed roughly 56, times longer than our species has.
So of course we have loads of questions — in a cosmic sense, we just got here. Our first few decades of exploring our own solar system are merely a beginning. From here, just one human lifetime from now, our understanding of the universe and our place in it will have undoubtedly grown and evolved in ways we can today only imagine. What is an Exoplanet? In , an image from the Hubble Space Telescope HST suggested that star formation had reached a peak at roughly seven thousand million years ago.
Recently, however, astronomers have thought again. The Hubble Deep Field image was taken at optical wavelengths and there is now some evidence that a lot of early star formation was hidden by thick dust clouds. Dust clouds block the stars from view and convert their light into infrared radiation, making them invisible to the HST.
But Herschel could peer into this previously hidden Universe at infrared wavelengths, revealing many more stars then ever seen before. Soon Gaia will launch, which will study one thousand million stars in our Milky Way.
It will build on the legacy of the Hipparchus mission, which pinpointed the positions of more than one hundred thousand stars to high precision, and more than one million stars to lesser precision.
Gaia will monitor each of its one billion target stars 70 times during a five-year period, precisely charting their positions, distances, movements, and changes in brightness. Beginner Why do the planets orbit the sun? Beginner How do you measure the distance between Earth and the Sun?
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