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Originally from the North of England. Growing up my mother had a huge leather bound book full of stories of ghosts, alien sightings, spontaneous combustion, fairies, ghouls and more. You name it, it was in there. And I was fascinated. I've often thought about that book. I'd love to ask my mother about it but alas, she is no longer with us. So I resolved to create this site. It's the closest thing to it I could get. I hope that some of the joy I had reading that book is passed on to you here today.

What Is The Great Attractor
Space

What Is The Great Attractor?

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What if I told you there is a mass out in space that weighs around one thousand trillion times that of our Sun. And that we are hurtling towards it at 1,300,000mph (2,000,000kph)?

But wait! There’s more. We aren’t sure what it is that’s pulling us to it at such a rate of knots. Because we can’t see it. It’s hidden from us. Obscured by the Zone of Avoidance. Which sounds much cooler and more spacey than it is. Basically, the centre of our galaxy (the milky way) is in the way. The stars, gas and dust that make up the galactic centre block our view.

The Milky Way. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=296589

The Great Attractor – A Galaxy Supercluster?

Slowly, relentlessly, we are being pulled across space. The only force that can act on us this way at such a huge distance is gravity. And what a huge distance it is. The Great Attractor is not a thing, you see, it’s a place. And it’s 150 million lights years from where we are. To put that into perspective, light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometres per second). At that speed you could circle the earth more than 7 times a second.

So if it takes light 150 million years to travel that far, it’s a pretty big distance. To quote the late, great Douglas Adams:

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Using modern infrared imaging, we have managed to piece together some information about 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.

And we call it the Norma Cluster. Scientists believe that the huge mass giving the Great Attractor its name is made up of a supercluster of galaxies. All of which are pulling on us. Not just us, but everything in our galaxy and all the galaxies around us.

Eventually we will all collide in this space, or will we?

There’s always a bigger fish

As we and all our surrounding galaxies are pulled towards the Great Attractor, it too is being subjected to an even bigger force.

The Shapley Supercluster contains more than 8000 galaxies and has a mass of ten million billion Suns. I don’t even know how to express that in any meaningful way. It’s a staggeringly large number.

But know this, it’s enough to drag the enormous mass of the Great Attractor towards it. And where it goes, we must follow.

So, to answer the question, What is the Great Attractor? It’s a gravitational anomaly we think is caused by a cluster of galaxies lying in a part of space we can’t quite see.

Sources:

The Great Attractor Explained (medium.com)

What is the Great Attractor (universetoday.com)

Will the Great Attractor destroy us? (space.com)

Great Attractor (wikipedia.org)

Header Image (pixabay.com)

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