Science!

The region of the universe we live in may be significantly bigger than we thought. A new study reveals that the intergalactic supercluster holding the Milky Way may be part of an even bigger "basin of attraction" that's up to 10 times larger than the one we currently call home.

The universe is full of basins of attraction (BOAs) — regions within which everything is being pulled inward by the gravity of a massive object. BOAs can stack inside one another like nesting dolls. For example, the moon circles Earth, which in turn orbits the sun along with the rest of the solar system, which is itself spiraling around the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy.

But the story doesn't end there. The next layer of the BOA doll is the Local Group, which includes the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy, along with their smaller satellite galaxies such as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. After that, the next layers are the Virgo Cluster, which holds around 2,000 galaxies, and the larger Virgo Supercluster. The final known layer is Laniākea (meaning "immense heaven" in the Hawaiian language) — a supercluster first discovered in 2014, which holds around 100,000 galaxies and spans roughly 500 million light-years across.

But in the new study, published Sept. 27 in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers analyzed the relative movements of more than 56,000 galaxies to create a 3D "probabilistic" map of all the BOAs surrounding the Milky Way. This revealed that there is a decent chance our home galaxy is part of an even larger BOA — the Shapley Concentration — that has a volume up to 10 times greater than Laniākea. (Scientists already knew the Shapley Concentration existed but did not previously believe it impacted the Milky Way.)...................

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...S&cvid=a0f0b84c506544abbaf4167f73c8443f&ei=34