This beautiful space portrait was taken with the WFC3 — Hubble’s onboard camera. It shows the galaxy NGC 4571, located 60 million light years from Earth in the line of the constellation Coma Berenices.
NGC 4571 is a spiral galaxy, just like our own Milky Way. In Hubble’s picture, you can see its spiral sleeves wrapped around a bright core. NGC 4571 is a part of Virgo Cluster, which includes more than a thousand galaxies. It, in turn, is part of an even larger formation known as the Virgo Supercluster or the Local Galaxy Supercluster.
The Virgo Supercluster is a structure about 200 million light-years long. It includes more than a hundred different galactic clusters, including the Local Group of Galaxies, which is the home for our Milky Way. In total, the Virgo Supercluster contains about 30,000 galaxies.
However, this is not the limit. In turn, the Virgo Supercluster is a part of an even grander structure called Laniakea. It is about 520 million light-years in diameter and contains more than 100,000 galaxies. The center of gravity of Laniakea is located in the Great Attractor — a mysterious gravitational anomaly located 250 million light years from the Milky Way. According to the most popular version, it is a supercluster of galaxies.
Earlier we wrote about how astronomers discovered giant galactic currents in Laniakea.
According to https://esahubble.org
