Laniakea
520 millionlight-years across
Laniakea — Hawaiian for "immense heaven" — is our home supercluster: roughly 100,000 galaxies, including the Milky Way, spread across 520 million light-years and all drifting toward a mysterious region called the Great Attractor.
▶ See Laniakea in the Cosmic Zoom
Your cosmic postal address, second-to-last line
Defined in 2014 by mapping the flow of galaxies (rather than just their positions), Laniakea is the watershed of gravity we belong to: every galaxy inside it is being pulled along coherent streams toward the Great Attractor, a dense concentration of mass we can barely observe because it hides behind the plane of our own galaxy. The Milky Way sits far out on one of those streams — not anywhere near the centre of anything.
Light crossing Laniakea sets out before Earth had multicellular life and arrives after — travelling the whole way at the fastest speed physics allows.
In the Cosmic Zoom, Laniakea is the eighth rung of the ladder — by this stage of the journey, entire galaxies have become the specks.
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✓ Facts verified July 2026
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