Monday, April 06, 2015 at 4:00 PM

JILA Auditorium

Brent Tully, University of Hawaii

"The Laniakea Supercluster of Galaxies"

Abstract:

Cosmicflows-2 provides distances for over 8000 galaxies giving the most extensive all-sky sample of peculiar velocities available. A detailed description of local structure is developed from a Wiener Filter reconstruction of velocities and densities. We are embedded in a basin of attraction at rest with respect to the CMB that extends beyond our data zone of 200 Mpc. This talk focuses on only a part of this as yet poorly defined entity. We live in a local basin of attraction with characteristic dimensions of 80 Mpc. In this region, flows converge toward a location in the zone of obscuration near the Norma Cluster. This entire region is displacing toward the Shapley Concentration. The local basin of attraction, though not a true potential minimum, is of interest as the largest inward gathering of flows bounded by current peculiar velocity measurements. We call this local basin of attraction the Laniakea Supercluster.

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