A, B, C

4

With some eight thousand-plus others, our own turning galaxy arcs toward the Great Attractor in our supercluster of the galactic net, a cluster containing the Virgo galaxy cluster at the end of one peninsula of galaxies off the parent cluster, while ours is at the end of another, next to it. Till recently, we thought we were part of Virgo. But we’re not. Both our galaxy — the Milky Way — and the Virgo cluster are on short chains of galaxies that feed into the major supercluster (more like an unraveled ball of string than a swarm of bees), which is about a hundred times larger than astronomers thought even a few decades ago. Only this year have they started calling that larger structure Laniakea — Hawaiian for “Immeasurable Heaven.” Now it’s been measured and is currently among the biggest structures the descendants of our million-times great-grandmother (or great-aunt) “Lucy” and her many-times-grandson (or great-nephew), “Red Clay Man” (the meaning of the Hebrew name “Adam”; which tells not only what they thought he looked like but what they thought he was made of) have individuated, mapped, and named — though Lucy and Adam both probably saw fragments of it when they looked up at the naked night, as we can today. It’s about a hundred million light-years across. But, about that size, many more link to it, to make the gravity-enchained galactic net. Google Laniakea or Perseus-Pisces or the Great Attractor or the Shapley Supercluster; or the Axis of Evil or the Bright Spot — all galaxy markers in our expanding map of the multiverse. All are impressive.

For all it doesn’t tell us about dark matter and dark energy, light carries an awesome amount of information throughout the multiverse, whether from the edges of the visible or from the leaf by my shoe sole at a puddle’s edge, information that links through evolution to why and how so many creatures — including most humans — have eyes.