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Matter is not spread evenly. It hangs in filaments strung around empty voids.
On the largest scales the universe looks like foam, or like the inside of a sponge. Galaxies are not scattered at random: they sit on threads, threads meet at knots, and the space between is close to empty.
Laniakea. The orange dot just right of centre, near the edge, is us. Laniakea was defined in 2014, not by drawing a line around galaxies but by watching which way they fall. Everything inside it…
The pattern was seeded by tiny density ripples in the first fraction of a second, and grew for 13.8 billion years under gravity.