Close your eyes, count to five, and then open them again.
Congratulations! The gravitational force of the Great Attractor has now moved you approximately 3,000 km (1,864 miles) away from where you were when you closed.
This is a region of intergalactic space 150-250 million light-years away from Earth, which is slowly pulling at the Milky Way and thousands of other galaxies.
At least for now, but more on that later.
The universe keeps moving
The important thing to remember here is that nothing stands still in the universe, and while you’re probably feeling like you’re sitting still as you read this, you’re actually not.
The Earth rotates on its axis at a speed of about 1,600 km (1,000 miles) per hour.
We also have to take into account that it orbits the Sun at about 108,000 km/h (67,000 mph), and then the speed of the solar system itself. Orbiting the center of the Milky Way At an astounding speed of 828,000 kilometers per hour (500,000 miles per hour).
And it’s currently ongoing The expansion of the universe…
The universe, simply put, is a complex mixture of forces whose combined influence keeps everything in motion, some objects inexorably attracted to one another while others are pushed further and further apart.
It’s all very confusing, but humans are so clever that by the late 1970s we had figured out most of the above – equations, formulas, arcane constants – and more.
But then someone noticed a problem.
Discovery of the Great Attractor
Astronomers Redshift In observations of other galaxies (where light has been “stretched” to longer wavelengths to reach Earth, a useful indicator of distance), it has been noticed that, in addition to the expected motion due to the phenomena outlined above, the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies also appear to be moving at a speed of about 600 km/s towards a point in space outside the plane of the Milky Way, in the direction of Trigonometria Saturn and Trigonometria Nord.
Unfortunately, this region outside the plane of the Milky Way lies in the “avoidance region”, a part of space that is blocked by the light of the Milky Way and therefore cannot be seen.
The effects of the Great Attractor were first observed in 1978, but it was almost a decade later that advances in X-ray astronomy made it possible to make a more accurate “map” of the universe and work out what was going on.
And lots of confusing moves are back!
The Milky Way and our local group of galaxies are attracted to a much larger group of galaxies called the Virgo Cluster, which in turn is a much larger group of galaxies called the Virgo Cluster. Virgo Supercluster…and it’s moving toward the center of an even larger supercluster called Laniakea.
And at the heart of Laniakea is, you guessed it, the Great Attractor.
So what is the Great Attractor?
In other words, the Great Attractor is not so much an object as it is a Star, Comet or Galaxy — not a place, but the central gravitational point of the Laniakea Supercluster, where we’re hurtling along at a dizzying 600 kilometers per second.
But here’s the problem: you never actually get there.
Laniakea is so large that it could be seen as a galaxy or a Galaxy Group teeth.
that’s why, Dark Energy What causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate rather than slow down is that all of the components of the universe are gradually moving apart at an accelerating rate.
At the time of writing, the gravitational force from the Great Attractor is strong enough to pull on the Milky Way galaxy, and will continue to do so for the next several billion years.
But eventually, dark energy will push the Great Attractor region farther away from us, and it will no longer have the same kind of gravitational influence, and our Milky Way galaxy will start to move away from us instead of being attracted to the Great Attractor.
