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They call it the Great Attractor and we’re flying towards this unseen object at 14 million miles an hour.
The Great Attractor is a diffuse mass concentration, a gravity anomaly in intergalactic space 250 million light-years away, but so large it pulls our own Milky Way Galaxy and millions of other galaxies towards it.
The first indications of a deviation from uniform expansion of the universe were reported in 1973 and again in 1978. The location of the Great Attractor was finally determined in 1986. But physicists who study this mysterious object are not exactly sure what it is. Actually they say “We don't have a clue what it is and we call it the Great Attractor.”
Panoramic view of the entire near-infrared sky. The location of the Great Attractor is shown following the long blue arrow at bottom-right.
According to Universetoday, part of the reason the Great Attractor is so mysterious is that it happens to lie in a direction of the sky known as the “Zone of Avoidance”. This is in the general direction of the center of our galaxy.
The mass of the Great Attractor isn’t large enough to account for the pull. When we look at an even larger region of galaxies, we find that the local galaxies and the Great Attractor are moving toward something even larger. It’s known as the Shapley Supercluster.
It contains more than 8000 galaxies and has a mass of more than ten million billion Suns. The Shapley Supercluster is, in fact, the most massive galaxy cluster within a billion light years, and we and every galaxy in our corner of the Universe are moving toward it.
What you think they will discover over in the region we’re drifting towards?
Fiction:
A cosmic string, artificially made into a loop creating the phenomenon of the Great Attractor (Fiction Pip and Flinx series) or an attempt of an ancient alien race to create something with enough gravitational pull to move the Milky Way, among other galaxies (Fiction Xeelee Sequence series) or the Great Attractor is said to be the last creation of a cosmic super-race called the Constructors of Destiny, and is a quantum supercomputer constructed of strange matter with the event horizon as its memory store, designed for the purpose of understanding the Universe (Fiction The Doctor Who novel The Quantum Archangel).
Fiction becomes reality?