01Size15.0 million lyDist53.9 million ly
Virgo Cluster
Our local galaxy cluster — one of thousands in the universe.
Galaxy clusterCosmos
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The supercluster of galaxy clusters our Milky Way lives inside.
R. Brent Tully et al. (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Laniakea Supercluster Andromeda Distance from Earth
125×
farther from Earth
Distance from Earth
317 million ly
Laniakea Supercluster is roughly 125× farther from Earth than Andromeda.
Picture this
If the Milky Way were a grain of rice, Laniakea would still be the size of a small city — a city in which every grain is a galaxy, and every street curves toward the same hidden pull.
By weight
Laniakea is so massive it would take Earth-sized bodies a trillion-trillion of them to weigh as much — and yet, cosmologically, it's still being pulled apart by dark energy.
Laniakea is the vast supercluster of which our Milky Way is a tiny outer participant. It spans roughly 500 million light-years and contains about 100,000 galaxies organised along filaments that all stream toward a common gravitational basin — the Great Attractor. Astronomers only formally identified Laniakea in 2014. Even larger structures exist out there, such as the contentious Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, but no supercluster is truly bound by gravity — cosmic expansion is gradually pulling them apart.
Did you know?
The name "Laniakea" was chosen in honour of the Polynesian navigators who crossed the Pacific by reading the stars; in Hawaiian it means "immeasurable heaven."
Last updated 2026-05-17
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Scale
The supercluster of galaxy clusters our Milky Way lives inside.
Size
529 million ly
Tap a dot to preview it. Use the Open stop link to read its full page. Stops are arranged from smallest on the left to largest on the right.
Our local galaxy cluster — one of thousands in the universe.
The 93-billion-light-year sphere we can, in principle, see.
Our nearest large galactic neighbour — and our future collision partner.