Cosmic Scale
Largest structures in the universe
Galaxies gather into groups, clusters and superclusters, strung along walls and filaments around enormous voids. The largest of them span billions of light-years, and the observable universe itself is about 93 billion light-years across.
See cosmic structures in 3D, at true scale
| # | Name | Diameter | × Milky Way |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Local Group Our group of 80+ galaxies | 10 million light-years | 100 |
| 2 | Virgo Cluster Cluster of galaxies | 14 million light-years | 144 |
| 3 | Coma Cluster Rich cluster of galaxies | 20 million light-years | 200 |
| 4 | Virgo Supercluster Supercluster of galaxy groups | 110 million light-years | 1,100 |
| 5 | Shapley Supercluster The most massive nearby supercluster | 160 million light-years | 1,600 |
| 6 | Boötes Void Cosmic void | 400 million light-years | 4,040 |
| 7 | Laniakea Supercluster Our home supercluster | 520 million light-years | 5,200 |
| 8 | Sloan Great Wall Wall of galaxies | 1.4 billion light-years | 13,700 |
| 9 | Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall Largest known structure | 10 billion light-years | 100,000 |
| 10 | Observable Universe Everything we can ever see | 93 billion light-years | 930,000 |
Cosmic structures
Observable Universe
The observable universe is the sphere around us from which light has had time to arrive since the Big Bang.
Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall
The Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall is the largest structure known in the universe: a region about 10 billion light-years long where gamma-ray bursts are unusually common, suggesting a huge concentration of galaxies.
Sloan Great Wall
The Sloan Great Wall is a vast sheet of galaxies about 1.37 billion light-years long, found in 2003 in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Laniakea Supercluster
Laniakea was defined in 2014 by mapping how galaxies move rather than where they sit: every galaxy whose flow converges on the same point belongs to it.
Boötes Void
The Boötes Void is an enormous, nearly empty bubble in space about 400 million light-years across.
Shapley Supercluster
The Shapley Supercluster is the largest concentration of galaxies within about a billion light-years: more than 8,000 galaxies in dozens of clusters, with ESO 383-76 among them.
Virgo Supercluster
The Virgo Supercluster is the collection of galaxy groups around the Virgo Cluster, with our Local Group sitting out near its edge.
Coma Cluster
The Coma Cluster is a rich cluster of over 1,000 galaxies, most of them ellipticals.
Virgo Cluster
The Virgo Cluster is the nearest large cluster of galaxies, about 1,300 of them, and the heart of the Virgo Supercluster that contains the Local Group.
Local Group
The Local Group is our galactic neighbourhood: more than 80 galaxies bound together by gravity, dominated by the Milky Way and Andromeda, with Triangulum a distant third and the rest mostly dwarfs.