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The universe never fails to baffle us, with new mysteries unravelled regularly. Now a study has found something fascinating about our galaxy, the Milky Way. Home to nearly 400 billion stars, astronomers say it is only a tiny part of an even larger local structure.
Scientists say that we are part of a larger system that is only a tiny shred of an even bigger structure in space. Even the Andromeda Galaxy is part of this local structure, as our several other smaller galaxies.
The study, published in Nature Astronomy, further boggles your mind by stating that this local structure is not a loner. It lives on the outer edge of the Virgo Supercluster, which is itself part of a giant basin known as Laniakea. The researchers say that Laniakea also resides within another larger "basin of attraction" (BoA) which is potentially 10 times its volume.
They explain, "The entire Universe can be considered a patchwork of abutting BoA, just as the terrestrial landscape is separated into watersheds."
Explaining what BoAs are, they explain in the paper that they are "not gravitationally bound because the relative motion of distant points within it is usually dominated by cosmic expansion."
The team tried to make a "probabilistic map" of the local universe by looking at the motions of 56,000 galaxies to narrow down the possibility of the existence of these basins of attraction.
“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," astronomer R. Brent Tully at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa, explained in a statement.
Further simulations found that the BoA holds within themselves several gigantic structures, including the mysterious Great Attractor.
"Nearby, evidence emerges for a BoA centred in proximity to the highly obscured Ophiuchus cluster that lies behind the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy," the paper says.
"This BoA may include the so-called Great Attractor region and the entity Laniakea, including ourselves. In the extension [...] the Sloan Great Wall and the associated structure are overwhelmingly dominant."
However, despite all this, the researchers say the situation out there might be completely different. For eg, they believe that our own Milky Way might not be in Laniakea at all, but in the Shapley concentration.
