University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in the context of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors baseball

The Laniakea Supercluster or Laniakea for short (/ˌlɑːni.əˈkeɪ.ə/; Hawaiian for "open skies" or "immense heaven"), sometimes also called the Local Supercluster (LSC or LS), is the large-scale structure centered around the Great Attractor that is home to the Milky Way and approximately 100,000 other nearby galaxies. It was originally defined in September 2014 as a galaxy supercluster, when a group of astronomers, including R. Brent Tully of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Hélène Courtois of the University of Lyon, Yehuda Hoffman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Daniel Pomarède of CEA Université Paris-Saclay published a new way of defining superclusters according to the relative velocities of galaxies as basins of attraction. The new definition of the local supercluster subsumes the then prior defined Virgo and Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster as appendages, the former being the prior defined local supercluster.

Follow-up studies suggest that the Laniakea is not gravitationally bound. It will disperse rather than continue to maintain itself as an overdensity relative to surrounding areas. In addition, some papers favored the traditional definition of superclusters as high-density regions of the cosmic web; basins of attraction including Laniakea were therefore proposed to be called "supercluster cocoons" (or "cocoons" for short), containing smaller traditional superclusters, which evolve inside their parent cocoon.

The University of Hawaiʻi System is the public higher education system of the state of Hawaii. The system confers associate, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees through three universities, seven community colleges, an employment training center, three university centers, four education centers, and various other research facilities distributed across six islands throughout the state of Hawaii.

All schools in the University of Hawaiʻi System are accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. The system's main administrative offices are located on the property of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Honolulu.

Derek Bickerton (March 25, 1926 – March 5, 2018) was an English-born American linguist, novelist, and professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he has proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of language both by individuals and as a feature of the human species. He is the originator and main proponent of the language bioprogram hypothesis according to which the similarity of creoles is due to their being formed from a prior pidgin by children who all share a universal human innate grammar capacity.

Bickerton also wrote several novels. His novels have been featured in the works of the Sun Ra Revival Post Krautrock Archestra, through spoken word and musical themes.

Scott Sander Sheppard (born 1977) is an American astronomer and a discoverer of numerous moons, comets and minor planets in the outer Solar System.

He is an astronomer in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC. He attended Oberlin College as an undergraduate, and received his bachelor in physics with honors in 1998. Starting as a graduate student at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, he was credited with the discovery of many small moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. He has also discovered the first known trailing Neptune trojan, 2008 LC18, the first named leading Neptune trojan, 385571 Otrera, and the first high inclination Neptune trojan, 2005 TN53. These discoveries showed that the Neptune trojan objects are mostly on highly inclined orbits and thus likely captured small bodies from elsewhere in the Solar System.

Robert J. Weryk (born 1981) is a Canadian physicist and astronomer. He currently works at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where he discovered the first known interstellar object, ʻOumuamua. He has also published numerous articles on meteors and other astronomical topics.

Lyle Richard Campbell (born October 22, 1942) is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.