Great Attractor: Mysterious Gravitational Anomaly Beyond Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster

A. Sutherland – MessageToEagle.com – In the 1980s, a group of astronomers noticed that galaxies are very unevenly distributed in space, with galactic superclusters separated by incredibly huge voids of visible ordinary matter.

Panoramic view of the entire near-infrared sky. The location of the Great Attractor is shown following the long blue arrow at bottom-right. Thomas Jarrett/IPAC/Caltech

The Great Attractor is a huge and perplexing astrophysical enigma.

It is a gigantic concentration of matter spread over a wide area of about 400 million light-years. It is located approximately 250 million light-years away beyond the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster at the center of the Laniakea Supercluster (home to the Milky Way and approximately 100,000 other nearby galaxies).

See also:

‘Zone of Avoidance’ And Vela Supercluster, One Of The Most Gigantic Objects Revealed Behind The Milky Way

‘Zone Of Avoidance’ – Hidden Galaxies Behind The Milky Way – Discovered

Boss Great Wall: Gigantic Wall Of Galaxies Located In Deep Space

The Great Attractor is considered to be a gravitational anomaly that reveals the existence of a localized concentration of mass tens of thousands of times more massive than the Milky Way.

Observing the Great Attractor is difficult at optical wavelengths. The plane of the Milky Way — responsible for the numerous bright stars in this image — both outshines (with stars) and obscures (with dust) many of the objects behind it. There are some tricks for seeing through this — infrared or radio observations, for instance — but the region behind the center of the Milky Way, where the dust is thickest, remains an almost complete mystery to astronomers. Image credit: ESA/Hubble/NASA

The anomaly is pulling hundreds of thousands of galaxies, including the Milky Way. This pulling happens at velocities of about 600 to thousands of kilometers (or miles) per second!

It lies in the so-called “Zone of Avoidance“, where the dust and stars of the Milky Way’s disk obscure as much as a quarter of the Earth’s visible sky.

The survey conducted in 2005 confirmed earlier theories that the Milky Way galaxy was, in fact, being pulled towards a much more massive cluster of galaxies near the Shapley Supercluster, which is beyond the Great Attractor.

The Shapley Supercluster (SCl 124) is the largest concentration of galaxies in our nearby universe. It contains more than 8000 galaxies with a total mass of more than ten million billion times the mass of the Sun. It’s the most massive galaxy cluster within a billion light-years, and we and every galaxy in our region of the universe are moving toward it.

Written by – A. Sutherland  – MessageToEagle.com Senior Staff Writer

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