A team led by University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomer R. Brent Tully has defined and mapped a supercluster of galaxies that is home to our own Milky Way galaxy, and named it “Laniakea,” which means immense heaven in Hawaiian.

The study will be the cover story in the Sept. 4 edition of the journal Nature.

The Laniakea supercluster is 500 million light-years in diameter and contains the mass of a hundred quadrillion suns in 100,000 galaxies, the researchers found.

The scientists proposed that galaxies are not distributed randomly throughout the universe. Instead, they are found in groups that contain dozens of galaxies, and in massive clusters containing hundreds of galaxies, all interconnected in a web of filaments in which galaxies are strung like pearls. Where these filaments intersect are huge structures, called “superclusters.”  The supercluters are interconnected, but they have poorly defined boundaries.

The researchers found that the Milky Way exists in the outer edges of a supercluster that for the first time, was mapped using new techniques. 

The name Laniakea was suggested by Nawa’a Napoleon, an associate professor of Hawaiian Language and chairwoman of the chair of the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at Kapiolani Community College.

The name honors Polynesian navigators who used knowledge of the heavens to voyage across the Pacific Ocean.

The other  authors are H?l?ne Courtois (University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Lyon, France), Yehuda Hoffman (Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem), and Daniel Pomar?de (Institute of Research on Fundamental Laws of the Universe, CEA/Saclay, France).

Tully recently shared the 2014 Gruber Cosmology Prize and the 2014 Victor Ambartsumian International Prize or his role in understanding the structure and evolution of the nearby universe and for his constribution to astronomy/astrophysics and related sciences.