laniakea
Diameter: 520,000,000 light years
Can you still see the Milky Way? It is just a tiny dot in this vast map of superclusters. With approximately 100,000 galaxies, this family potentially holds billions of stars.
The team of astronomers was led by Dr. R. Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. They discovered Laniakea by studying the motion of galaxies, instead of their location.
"Laniakea" is a Hawaiian word meaning "immense heaven" or "spacious skies". It pays homage to the traditional Hawaiian navigators who used the stars with reverence in their voyages.
Within the structure of Laniakea is a strange gravitational anomaly called The Great Attractor. It influences all of Laniakea's galaxies by pulling them closer to it. It is still being studied and observed.
Laniakea itself is part of an even larger cosmic family called the cosmic web. Today, the cosmic web is what's considered to be the largest known structure of organized matter in the observable universe.
The observable universe is approximately 93 billion light years, and as the name suggests, that's the part of the universe that we can currently study because of the limitations in our technology. All in all, our cosmic family has an estimated number of 2 trillion galaxies, 200 sextillion stars, and quadrillions of planets.
