Is a monster in the depths of space approaching us?

One of the biggest mysteries facing astronomers is the Great Attractor – a gravitational anomaly lurking in the darkest corners of space.

Since the beginning of time, after the Big Bang, the Universe has been expanding rapidly, but as it turns out, not all galaxies move the same way. Somewhere far from us, in the deep expanses of space, lurks the Great Attractor, a mysterious force that is slowly but surely approaching us.

Scientists noticed the strange behavior of galaxies in neighboring regions of the Universe back in the 1970s. In addition to the movement of galaxies in the direction of the expansion of the Universe, it was also observed that all the galaxies around us seemed to be moving towards the same point.

Scientists focused on 400 elliptical galaxies and noticed that they were moving toward something we couldn’t see.

This region is known as the “Zone of Avoidance,” or the region of the sky that is obscured by the galactic plane of the Milky Way and the cosmic dust within it.

The “avoidance zone” was discovered only thanks to radio telescopes and telescopes operating in the infrared range. Experts have called it the Great Attractor, a region of the Universe that exhibits a gravitational anomaly.

It is not a supermassive space object, but rather a volume of space containing the center of gravity of all matter.

This region is at the center of a massive cluster of galaxies called Laniakea, which is more than 520 million light years in diameter. It contains more than 100,000 galaxies, including our Milky Way.

Astronomers can only infer the mass and location of the Great Attractor from scant surveys of the Zone of Avoidance and simulations of galactic motion.

The region where the Great Attractor is located contains a huge cluster of mass called the Norma Cluster. Our Virgo star cluster and all of its surrounding galaxies are moving towards Norma, the center of the flow of all galaxies within Laniakea.