What cosmic structures contain our galaxy and solar system

When you look up at the night sky, nearly everything visible to the naked eye belongs to our own Milky Way galaxy. The planets, our Moon, and asteroids are all part of our Solar System, nested inside a much larger cosmic architecture. Astronomers have discovered that galaxies cluster together at multiple scales: our Milky Way is part of the Local Group, a collection of roughly 80 galaxies held together by gravity. The Local Group itself is part of the Virgo Supercluster, an even larger structure containing tens of thousands of galaxies. Some evidence suggests these superclusters might be organized into even grander structures called filaments and walls. Understanding these nested hierarchies helps explain how gravity has shaped the universe's large-scale structure since the Big Bang. The deeper we look, the more we realize our Solar System and galaxy are just tiny specks in an incomprehensibly vast cosmic web.