Fractal Cloud of Monarch Butterflies

A massive cloud of monarch butterflies heading south for winter through St. Louis, Missouri, looks like a giant butterfly. A nice example of nature replicating patterns up and down scale. The small white lines on the chart indicate counties. This butterfly cloud is huge.

Gigantic cloud of monarch butterflies crossing Missouri.

In fractal terms, you could say the cloud is a fractal iteration upscale of the butterfly. The wings are obvious, and it even replicated the antennae and body! In the third panel where you can barely see the cloud, the butterflies are probably wings down in unison flapping and not reflecting the radar.

Laniakea Supercluster New Home for Milky Way

Look at how beautiful this imagery is for the latest ginormous bubble discovered in our neck of the universe. Looks a lot like a giant breast with milk ducts, doesn't it? Gives another meaning to "milky way."

According to the Simple Explanation's story of creation, there are torus-shaped eddies of gravity and energy scattered throughout the universe, ranging in size from tiny to gigantic. This Laniakea would be one such example of a giant vortex that grabbed interstellar particles from the earliest expansion and pulled them into this local system. The toroidal vortex for this large system can be seen on the surface.

Here's a short animation of the cluster provided by nature video. It's stunning!

Below is a graph of the stellar material distributed throughout Laniakea. Now you can see how the matter was attracted to this region by the gravity well at the middle of its torus shape. There are also other gravity vortices scattered throughout, which cause galaxies to form.

According to James Cave's article in Huffington Post (9/5/14), 

"Until now, the Milky Way was believed to be one galaxy in the 2,000 that make up what's known as the Virgo "supercluster." But as the new map shows, the Milky Way's 100 billion stars are actually part of something 100 times bigger: a supercluster of galaxies astronomers have christened Laniakea, meaning "immense heavens" in the Hawaiian language.

Laniakea spans some 520 million light-years across. As you might imagine, all those stars contain a lot of mass. In fact, astronomers say the supercluster is as massive as 100 million billion suns.

How was this supercluster discovered? Researchers used an algorithm to translate the velocities of 8,000 galaxies that surround the Milky Way to show where they are in relation to one another and also how gravity from areas of dark matter causes them to move."

Simple Explanation Blog About to Hit Stats Milestone

It looks as though the Simple Explanation blog is about to pass the 100,000 hits mark. Thank you all.

Stay tuned for more frequent articles before too long. Our bed and breakfast has sold and so I will have more time available for writing very soon.