What is the GREAT ATTRACTOR? Will It Absorb us? And What is DARK FLOW?

Our Milky way galaxy is not stationary. It’s attracted by a massive object in space called the great attractor, at more than 600 km/s. What is this great attractor? Will it destroy us? And, what is Dark Flow?

Our galaxy is part of more than a million galaxies in the Virgo super cluster, stretching 100 million light years. The gravity of all the mass in this super cluster keeps it together. Until recently, we thought our Milky Way galaxy was the entire universe. Edwin Hubble found out otherwise in 1923 (18th century French astronomer Charles Messier discovered the first galaxies, but he didn’t know it at the time).

Over time, gravity has caused these galaxies and clusters to group into large web like structures containing visible matter and huge voids. In the 1970’s we found evidence that these galaxies are moving through space. Initially scientists thought we were moving towards the constellation of Centaurus.

In the 1980’s we discovered that we abd 400 other galaxies were moving towards something, not quite towards Centaurus. That something was named the “Great Attractor.” It was calculated that it must have a mass of more than 10 million billion suns.

More evidence for the attraction comes from the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The light from the CMB is distorted due to a doppler effect, as seen in the CMB dipole. This allowed us to locate the source of the great attractor. But we couldn’t see what was there because it was obscured by the dust and matter of the Milky Way. But radio, infrared, and X rays can penetrate through the obstruction. Scientists found a rich cluster of galaxies in the center of the great attractor, called the Norma cluster.

But this Norma did not have enough mass to explain the movement. Something bigger was also attracting the great attractor along with our galaxy – a giant cluster of 8000 galaxies called the Shapley Supercluster or Shapley concentration.

This supercluster was discovered American astronomer Harlow Shapley in the 1930s. It’s 650 million light years away and has a mass 4 times that of the great attractor. it is the most massive structure within a billion light-years from us.

The CIZA project found that the Shapley concentration is the main source of our galaxy’s and the local group of galaxies’ movement. But there is another piece to the puzzle. In 2016, the team found that the Vela supercluster explains the final 10% of our movement.

Will our galaxy eventually all be absorbed in the great attractor or the Shapley cluster? No, because spacetime is expanding faster than our velocity towards these attractors due to Dark Energy.

DARK FLOW: The overall expansion of the universe is uniform, but cosmologists found an anomaly. Many galaxies might be moving in a preferred direction. This is called “dark flow” because it’s unexplained.

Some wild theories speculate that something massive might lie just outside the the visible universe, or it could be caused by a catastrophe in the early universe, setting up a motion that took billions of years to develop. But it’s more likely just a mistake in the data. Evidence indicates Dark Flow is probably not real.

Are we in danger? No. Any movement due to Dark flow and the Great Attractor are nothing to worry about. These movements so slow and the effect so tiny that it’s not going to make any difference to us or even our solar system.

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