Cosmic Structures

The vast supercluster the Milky Way belongs to, defined in 2014 by the flows of galaxies toward a common gravitational focus. It contains around a hundred thousand galaxies across half a billion light-years.

One of the largest known voids — an enormous, nearly-empty region of space containing very few galaxies, a vast bubble between the filaments and walls of the cosmic web.

A rich, dense cluster of over a thousand galaxies. In 1933 Fritz Zwicky found its galaxies moving far too fast to be held together by their visible mass — the first evidence for dark matter.

The gravitationally-bound group of galaxies the Milky Way belongs to — dominated by the Milky Way and Andromeda, with the Triangulum galaxy and dozens of dwarfs. Andromeda and the Milky Way are approaching, and will merge in a few billion years.

One of the largest known structures in the universe — an immense wall of galaxies stretching over a billion light-years, mapped by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, part of the filamentary cosmic web.

The nearest large galaxy cluster, over a thousand galaxies bound together and centred on the giant elliptical M87. Its gravity draws the Local Group toward it, and it anchors our corner of the local supercluster.