Saturday, 21 September 2013

galaxy - Is there a map of the galaxies?

A map of all galaxies gets kind of unwieldy, like a map of all stars in the milky way or a map of every house in the country, or every grain of sand on a beach . . . you get the idea.



Start here - Local Group



https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/5_Local_Galactic_Group_%28ELitU%29.png



Source



Then Virgo Supercluster



enter image description here



Source



Then local superclusters



enter image description here



Source



And an article, even if it's a summary it's very much worth reading, with a more recent map with a "ginormous" supercluster that includes the milky way.



http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2023458/thumbs/o-LANIAKEA-900.jpg?6



and here's another, more info here.



The largest of these maps is some 520 million light years across, so this is just a tiny part of the entire known universe, which (depending on how you measure) is either 27.5 billion light years across or 84 billion light years across.



It's worth pointing out, I haven't actually answered your question, and that was deliberate, cause I think the nearest 520 million light years is enough and it's all we have a really good picture of anyway (as far as I know). The farther out you go the more holes and inaccuracies there will be in the map.



There's also some closer stuff that's blocked by the Milky way so we can't see it, like the great attractor. No worries about superclusters eating our galaxy one day because dark energy expansion keeps these super-clusters from merging most of the time. Andromeda will merge with the Milky way in about 4 billion years though but we're not expected to ever merge with the great attractor, even as it pulls our galaxy towards it, the distance between us is growing.

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