supercluster
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Massive galaxy cluster found 'hiding' behind the Milky Way
You would think that it would be easy to spot a cosmic structure as enormous as a supercluster holding legions of galaxies, but not so -- the Milky Way can hide all kinds of objects, usually due to dust and stars obscuring the view. If you need proof, you just need to ask the astronomers who have discovered the Vela supercluster, a giant collection of galaxies about 800 million light years away (shown as "VSC" above). They only detected it by making "thousands" of spectroscopic studies of partially obscured galaxies -- it was hidden on the far side of the Milky Way.
Our entire Milky Way galaxy is just a dot in this supercluster
Ready to feel small? Our sun is just one of 300 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which itself is one of many, many other galaxies -- but at least we now know where it is. Astronomers have mapped a "supercluster" of galaxies including the Milky Way and dubbed it Laniakea, or "immeasurable heaven" in Hawaiian. Using several radio telescopes, the team calculated the movement of nearby galaxies relative to each other, after taking into account cosmic expansion. They chose the supercluster boundary based on that motion, since galaxies tend to flow along the same paths toward common gravitational wells. Lanaikea was defined based on its flow toward the "Great Attractor," along with another supercluster called Perseus-Pisces. As shown in the stunning video below, our own insignificant galaxy is on a prominent flow path in Laniakea, right at the edge of a massive void.
EVE dev video talks customer relations and server nodes
As part of a refocusing on developing EVE Online, CCP Games has recently taken us on a video tour of its art, features and core technology departments. This week it's the turn of the customer relations and Virtual Worlds departments as CCP Guard finds out what makes EVE tick. In his visit to the den of GMs, he finds that important stuck queue petitions are answered on average in 15 minutes, a response time much improved compared to a few years ago. Guard chats to several people from CCP's Virtual Worlds department, which is responsible for keeping all the EVE server clusters online and improving performance. CCP Hunter discusses what goes on during EVE's daily downtime and reveals that the once hour-long period has been reduced to only nine minutes per day. We also find out about recent hardware upgrades and the infamous "supernode" deployed for large-scale nullsec wars. Skip past the cut to watch the full video in HD.
