A mysterious cosmic zone that exerts an attraction on huge stellar bodies called Great Attractor, is being a galaxy magnet including our Milky Way.
Understanding this attraction will mean understanding that our Earth rotates around the Sun and that the Sun, along with it and the rest of the objects in our system rotate around the center of the Milky Way, therefore, our galaxy also moves.
Our galaxy not only moves but also moves at high speed, some towards a point in our cosmos called the Great Attractor.
Great Attractor, the devourer of galaxies?
Since it was located in the 70s, it has been known that the Great Attractor It is the final destination of billions of planets, stars, comets, cosmic dust, including the Milky Way, but what do we know about it?
Scientists know that it is located in intergalactic space, and It is the central point of gravity of the Laniakea Supercluster. The Milky Way is located in this place, as well as another 100 thousand similar galaxies.
Although there is a problem in studying this gravity region in the Universe because it is obscured through the galactic plane of the Milky Way, It is known to exist because of how galaxies move towards that same point in the cosmos.
Hence it is said that our galaxy is going in the direction of something that we cannot see clearly, but the focal point of that movement is the Great Attractor.
But how did they come to this conclusion?
The launch of the Space Telescope in the second half of the 20th century was a milestone that made a difference when it came to understanding the behavior of the Universe. There was so much information that astronomers received for the first time that they had to do a titanic job to somehow organize everything they were seeing.
This is how they began to map the cosmos and of course the fundamental question arose of where the Earth is in such a plethora of objects. They discovered the movement of the Milky Way and the Solar System within it, and compared it with the movement of other nearby galaxies, then they were clear: everything seemed to move in the same expansive direction.
Thanks to Hubble, scientists discovered that our galaxy is located in the so-called local cluster, the group of galaxies closest to ours. Along with the Virgo cluster and another hundred groups, where we find ourselves in the so-called Virgo supercluster. This supercluster, also called a local supercluster, spans a radius of 100 million light years or about 30 megaparsecs.
And on a larger scale it encompasses several superclusters with more than 100 thousand galaxies and extends over about 160 megaparsecs (more than 500 million light years) where it is located. the Great Attractor.
Will there be such an attraction to the center of gravity?
The Universe is expanding thanks to the force of dark energy, which is in some ways the opposite of gravity. While the latter contracts space-time, dark energy, instead of attracting, pushes everything.
Although the Great Attractor generates a small directionality independent of the expansion of the Universecausing all galaxies to move toward a common focal point, most likely The Milky Way will never really touch the Great Attractor.
The reason, the dark energy of the Universe will destroy our galaxy before it reaches its final destination, mainly because it is not a black hole, but rather a gravity anomaly.