What is Great Attractor and Why It's Pulling Every Galaxy?

Somewhere, in the deepest reaches of the cosmos, lies a mysterious space object. Slowly, it is pulling everything closer to it. We call it the Great Attractor. It is something that makes all the galaxies in the known universe move towards a single point.

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Studies in the 1970s and 80s suggested that the Milky Way Local group was moving at a specific rate and in a specific direction, in addition to the normal Hubble flow. Not only the Milky Way, but all nearby clusters were also moving in the same direction. This point of gravitational anomaly towards which all known galaxies were being “attracted” was later named, the Great Attractor.

In the 1970s when scientists were studying the homogeneity of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is the leftover signals from the Big Bang, they found that despite the overall homogenous structure of CMB, there were few distinctly warmer and colder regions in it. When the universe began, the matter was distributed homogeneously but over billions of years, galaxies converged into galactic clusters and then into dense superclusters and they have immensely warped the space-time around them. These regions of merged galaxies give small inhomogeneities in the cosmic background but due to large voids at other places, the universe is on average homogenous.

This indicated that although the universe is homogeneous, it is hierarchical. A galaxy consists of millions of stars. Nearby large galaxies are pulled towards each other at a much faster rate and are gravitationally bonded to each other to form a Group. For example, our Milky Way Galaxy, our galactic neighbor Andromeda galaxy, and the Triangulum galaxy are part of the Local Group, gravitationally bonded to each other and falling towards a common focal point. This Local Group is 10 million light-years in span. Several such local groups form a bigger cluster known as the “Virgo Cluster”, which is 65 million light-years in span. Similarly, many clusters form bigger entities known as Superclusters, for example, Virgo Supercluster, and Hydra-Centaurus Superclusters. Virgo Supercluster is in fact the arm of an even bigger superstructure known as “Laniakea Supercluster” which is home to nearly 100,000 other galaxies including our Milky Way.

Now, our Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy fall towards the center of mass of the Local group. Every other local group moves towards the center of the Virgo Supercluster i.e. Virgo clusters, and all clusters move towards the center of the Laniakea Supercluster. Thus, our Universe which looks homogenous on average is a collection of hundreds and thousands of such “patches” which are themselves collections of thousands of galaxies.

What Is The Great Attractor And Why It's Pulling Ever Galaxy?

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:44 The Big Bang & CMB
01:53 Is Our Universe Homogeneous?
03:24 The Great Attractor Explained
06:15 Dark Energy & Dark Flow

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Video Editor: Team 121 Creators (https://bit.ly/team121x)
Narration: Sidhart Viyapu (https://bit.ly/sidvoice)
Project Head: Rajkumar Shukla
Production: World Of Science Media (https://theworldofscience.co)

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