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the largest structure in the universe

The cosmic web

Laniakea is Hawaiian and means “immeasurable heaven”. It contains about 100,000 galaxies – one of them is ours.

▶ View in the 3D model

Key figures

Age of the universe

13.8 billion years

Observable universe

about 93 billion light-years across

Galaxies

about 2 trillion

Ordinary matter

only about 5%

Dark matter / dark energy

about 27% / 68%

Our supercluster

Laniakea, about 520 million light-years across

Interesting facts

• The universe is expanding: the further away distant galaxies are, the faster they fly away from us. Edwin Hubble discovered this in 1929.
• The James Webb Space Telescope sees galaxies whose light set off when the universe was only about 300 million years old.

What is the web made of?

Galaxies gather in clusters and long filaments of dark matter. In between lie huge voids, with almost no galaxies. The pattern grew out of tiny irregularities shortly after the Big Bang.

The deepest image

For the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (image above) the telescope stared for more than a million seconds at a tiny, seemingly empty patch of sky – about a tenth as wide as the Full Moon. It found about 10,000 galaxies. Today the James Webb Space Telescope looks back even further, to shortly after the Big Bang.

A Swiss discovers the invisible

In 1933 the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky found that the galaxies in the Coma Cluster were moving far too fast – there had to be much more mass than could be seen. He called it “dark matter”. To this day nobody knows exactly what it is made of.

Where is it?

The cosmic web belongs to the “The cosmic web” level of the Cosmic Zoom (field of view about 600 million light-years). Galaxies are spread out like dewdrops on a gigantic spider's web: in clusters and long filaments, with vast voids in between. Here the whole Local Group is a single point of light.

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