Virgo Supercluster

[/caption]
It’s time to expand your mind and consider the largest structures in the Universe: vast collections of galaxies known as superclusters. There’s really nothing bigger in the Universe. The supercluster we live in is known as the Virgo Supercluster. It’s an enormous collection of more than a million galaxies, stretching across a region of space 110 million light-years across.

Our Sun is just one member of the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is part of a collection of galaxies known as the Local Group. This contains three large spiral galaxies: the Milky Way, Andromeda, and the Triangulum Galaxy, as well as a few dozen dwarf galaxies. The Local Group is just one member of the Virgo Cluster. This is a collection of 1200-2000 galaxies that stretch across 15 million light-years of space. And then, the Virgo Cluster is just one cluster in the Virgo Supercluster.

Although astronomers recognized that we were in a supercluster of galaxies in the 1950s, it wasn’t until the 1970s that astronomers actually mapped out the Virgo Supercluster’s shape; it has a flattened disk, somewhat like our galaxy itself. Our Virgo Cluster is actually an outlying group of the Virgo Supercluster.

The Virgo Supercluster is just one of millions of superclusters across the Universe. From the largest scales, they’re arranged in long filaments and walls surrounding even large voids of space where there are almost no galaxies at all.

We have written many articles about galaxies for Universe Today. Here’s an article about how the Universe isn’t expanding uniformly.

If you’d like more info on galaxies, check out Hubblesite’s News Releases on Galaxies, and here’s NASA’s Science Page on Galaxies.

We have also recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast about galaxies – Episode 97: Galaxies.

Fraser Cain

Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today. He's also the co-host of Astronomy Cast with Dr. Pamela Gay. Here's a link to my Mastodon account.

Recent Posts

We Understand Rotating Black Holes Even Less Than We Thought

The theory of black holes has several mathematical oddities. Recent research shows our understanding of…

3 hours ago

Habitable Worlds are Found in Safe Places

When we think of exoplanets that may be able to support life, we hone in…

4 hours ago

New Glenn Booster Moves to Launch Complex 36

Nine years ago, Blue Origin revealed the plans for their New Glenn rocket, a heavy-lift…

4 hours ago

How Many Additional Exoplanets are in Known Systems?

NASA's TESS mission has turned up thousands of exoplanet candidates in almost as many different…

8 hours ago

Hubble and Webb are the Dream Team. Don't Break Them Up

Many people think of the James Webb Space Telescope as a sort of Hubble 2.…

15 hours ago

Scientists Have Figured out why Martian Soil is so Crusty

On November 26th, 2018, NASA's Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport (InSight)…

23 hours ago