The word stems from a line of the Kumulipo creation chant: “Hoʻoleilei ka lana a ka Pōuliuli,” meaning “From deep darkness come murmurs of awakening.” Ho‘oleilana is drawn from this chant and means “sent murmurs of awakening.” Origins of the Sphere The astronomers worked in partnership with Hawaiian language professor Larry Kimura (University of Hawaii) and Kaʻiu Kimura, director of the ʻImiloa Visitor Center to name the giant galactic sphere Ho‘oleilana. (Tully’s team discovered Laniākea in 2014.)Įxplore the sphere with this 3D visualization:Ĭosmography of Ho’oleilana by Daniel Pomarède on Sketchfab The whole sphere lies about 820 million light-years away from us, well outside the Laniākea Supercluster that encompasses the Milky Way Galaxy as well as all of the Local Group that we’re part of. Only in the very center does the number of galaxies increase again, due to a collection of galaxy clusters known as the Boötes Supercluster. Meanwhile, the sphere’s interior is sparse and contains the Boötes Void. The scales involved are truly grand: The galactic walls that make up the sphere are themselves millions or even a billion light-years long. is composed of elements that were identified in the past as being themselves some of the largest structures of the universe,” says cartographer Daniel Pomarede (Paris-Saclay University). “It was an amazing process to construct this map and see how the giant shell structure. Each of these walls is itself made of clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies. All around the sphere, the astronomers saw familiar structures, previously discovered in other sky surveys, such as the Sloan Great Wall, the Center for Astrophysics Great Wall, and the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. “It is so huge that it spills to the edges of the sector of the sky that we were analyzing.” The structure itself, however, had been previously discovered by Maret Einasto and colleagues in 2016, as reported in Astronomy & Astrophysics.Īs Tully and colleagues mapped out galaxy positions, they couldn’t help but notice the giant sphere take shape. “We were not looking for it,” Tully explains.
The size alone is enough to challenge fundamental ideas about the universe.īrent Tully (University of Hawaii) and his colleagues happened on the structure while mapping 55,877 galaxies in the local universe as part of a project known as Cosmicflows-4. Galaxies by the thousands lie along a spherical shell that spans 1 billion light-years. The green region at right is Laniakea, the supercluster that contains the Milky Way and our Local Group of galaxies.įrédéric Durillon / Animea Studio / Daniel Pomarède (IRFU, CEA University Paris-Saclay)Īstronomers mapping the precise distances to tens of thousands of galaxies have found a curious cosmic structure. The red region at left shows the enclosed shell with individual galaxies depicted as luminous tiny specks. This illustration is an artist's concept of the giant spherical shell named Hoʻoleilana.
0 kommentar(er)
