this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
147 points (99.3% liked)

Astronomy

4030 readers
6 users here now

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] yarn@sopuli.xyz 14 points 1 year ago (11 children)

What's the big blue thing, and are all the "walls"/white clusters orbiting around it? Sorry, I don't know anything about astronomy but I find that photo fascinating. I didn't know the universe was being mapped out like that haha.

[–] GeekFTW@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Not OP but the blue part would be this I assume - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea_Supercluster

Can't speak as to the white clusters so I'll let OP touch on that one lol

[–] yarn@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks, that clued me in to the existence of superclusters, a term I've never heard before, and then I somehow wound up here in search of my answer of if the superclusters are orbiting each other. That's a good read, for anybody interested, but here's the summary:

One object orbiting another is an illusion. Instead, all objects orbit their common center of mass, called the barycenter. It looks like we orbit the sun because our common center of gravity is beneath the sun’s surface.

When it comes to galaxies, we can say that each one in a cluster, such as our local group, is gravitationally bound and orbiting a common barycenter. That means the Milky Way is orbiting a point in space roughly midway between here and the Andromeda galaxy.

At the scale of superclusters, however, the mass is too spread out and homogenous for centers of gravity to form. With no common center of gravity, clusters of galaxies have nothing to orbit and so don’t.

Instead, they are steadily pushed apart by the expansion of space.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)