The Milky Way is speeding toward the Great Attractor at over one million miles per hour.
Key Takeaways:
- The Great Attractor is an enormous gravitational anomaly pulling the Milky Way and nearby galaxies off course.
- Scientists struggle to study it because the Milky Way’s dust and stars obscure the view, creating a Zone of Avoidance.
- The Local Group, including our galaxy, is moving toward this mysterious region at over one million miles per hour.
- One of the leading explanations for the Great Attractor’s pull is the Laniakea supercluster, an immense galactic structure.
- Understanding the Great Attractor could help scientists uncover hidden cosmic structures shaping the universe’s large-scale motion.
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A Cosmic Mystery Pulling Galaxies Off Course
Everything in the universe is constantly in motion, and the Milky Way is no exception. As Earth spins at 1,000 miles per hour and orbits the Sun at 67,000 miles per hour, our entire solar system is also hurtling around the center of the Milky Way at over 500,000 miles per hour. But beyond these familiar motions, our galaxy—and countless others in our Local Group—is being pulled by an unseen force at over one million miles per hour. This mysterious region is known as the Great Attractor.
The Great Attractor was first noticed in the 1970s when astrophysicists found that galaxies in our neighborhood were veering off their expected paths. However, studying this gravitational anomaly has proven difficult because it lies in a region of space obscured by the Milky Way’s dense clouds of stars and dust, an area called the Zone of Avoidance.
What’s Behind the Great Attractor’s Pull?
For decades, scientists have searched for the source of this powerful gravitational force. The most recent and promising candidate is the Laniakea supercluster, a massive structure containing around 100,000 galaxies. Named after the Hawaiian word for “immense heaven,” Laniakea is thought to be the dominant force directing the motion of the Local Group and beyond.
Jorge Moreno, a computational astrophysicist at Pomona College, highlights the challenge of studying this hidden force: “The Milky Way has millions and millions of stars and a lot of dust, which is blocking all that information that we could be measuring in that direction.” While much remains unknown, uncovering the secrets of the Great Attractor could provide new insights into the large-scale structure of the universe and the unseen forces shaping cosmic motion.
