One of the biggest mysteries facing astronomers is the Great Attractor – a gravitational anomaly lurking in the darkest reaches of space.
Since the beginning of time, after the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding rapidly, but it turns out that not all galaxies move in the same way. Somewhere far from us, in the deep vastness of space, lurks the Great Attractor, a mysterious force that is slowly but surely closing in on us.
Scientists noticed the strange behavior of galaxies in neighboring parts of the universe as early as the 1970s. In addition to the movement of galaxies in the direction of the expansion of the universe, it was also observed that all galaxies around us appeared to be moving towards the same point.
Scientists focused on 400 elliptical galaxies and noticed they were headed toward something we couldn’t see.
This region is known as the ‘Avoidance Zone’, or the region of the sky obscured by the galactic plane of the Milky Way and the cosmic dust within it.
The ‘avoidance zone’ was only discovered thanks to radio telescopes and telescopes operating in the infrared region. Experts call it the Great Attractor, an area in the universe that exhibits a gravitational anomaly.
It is not a supermassive space object, but rather a volume of space that contains the center of mass of all matter.
This region is at the center of a huge cluster of galaxies called Laniakea, with a diameter of more than 520 million light-years. It contains more than 100,000 galaxies, including our Milky Way.
Astronomers can only infer the mass and location of the Great Attractor from scant studies of the Avoidance Zone and simulations of galactic motion.
The region where the Great Attractor is located contains a huge cluster of mass, the Norma Cluster. Our Virgo star cluster and all its surrounding galaxies are moving towards Norma, the center of the flow of all galaxies in Laniakea.