Thanks to astronomers using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, Earth's celestial profile seems even smaller today, compared to the unfathomably large "Laniakea" collection of galaxies just recently identified.

Research detailed in a new paper published in the Sept. 4 issue of the journal Nature explain our own Milky Way galaxy has been found to be part of an astoundingly big galaxy supercluster scientists have dubbed "Laniakea," which means "Immense Heaven" in Hawaiian, according to a news release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a network of telescopes that includes the Green Bank facility, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope.

The paper's findings, explained the release, "help clarify the boundaries of our galactic neighborhood and establishes previously unrecognized linkages among various galaxy clusters in the local universe."

Among the largest bodies in the known universe, superclusters are made up of groups, like our own Local Group, that comprise dozens of galaxies, and massive clusters that contain hundreds of galaxies, all interconnected through an apparent web of filaments.

The Milky Way resides in the outskirts of one such supercluster, which, for the first time, has been mapped using newly-established techniques.

According to the NRAO, "Laniakea Supercluster is 500 million light-years in diameter and contains the mass of one hundred million billion Suns spread across 100,000 galaxies."

"We have finally established the contours that define the supercluster of galaxies we can call home," lead researcher R. Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said in a statement. "This is not unlike finding out for the first time that your hometown is actually part of much larger country that borders other nations."

Now, to better refine the maps they make of the cosmos, researchers are proposing a new way to evaluate these large-scale galaxy structures, by considering how they impact the motions of galaxies.

As such, a galaxy positioned between structures would likely be caught in a gravitational tug-of-war where the competing gravitational forces from the surrounding large-scale structures affects the galaxy's motion.

The NRAO was able to plot the velocities of galaxies throughout our local Universe and thereby define the region of space each supercluster dominates.

"Green Bank Telescope observations have played a significant role in the research leading to this new understanding of the limits and relationships among a number of superclusters," said Tully.

The name Laniakea was suggested by Nawa'a Napoleon, an associate professor of Hawaiian Language and chair of the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at Kapiolani Community College, a part of the University of Hawaii system -- and honors Polynesian navigators who used knowledge of the heavens to travel across the immense Pacific Ocean.