Laniakea
Data as of July 2026
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
Every figure on this page is a real, rounded value checked against primary sources. Found something out of date? See how we keep it accurate.