Where is the great attractor?

The location of the Great Attractor was finally determined in 1986: It is situated at a distance of somewhere between 150 and 250 Mly (million light-years) (47–79 Mpc) (the larger being the most recent estimate) away from the Milky Way, in the direction of the constellations Triangulum Australe (The Southern Triangle) ...

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What is at the center of the Great Attractor?

The Great Attractor is thought to be at the gravitational center of the Laniakea supercluster—of which the Milky Way is but one galaxy of 100,000 others. One theory is that it's a confluence of dark energy. Another is that it might be caused by over-density, an area of dense mass with an intense gravitational pull.

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Will we ever reach the Great Attractor?

The focal point of that movement is the Great Attractor, the product of billions of years of cosmic evolution. But we'll never reach our destination because, in a few billion years, the accelerating force of dark energy will tear the Universe apart.

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How fast are we being pulled towards the Great Attractor?

Whatever this Great Attractor is, it is so powerful that it has a mass capable of pulling millions and millions of stars towards it. Our own galaxy is moving towards this anomaly at a whopping 1,342,162 miles per hour. If the Earth moved that fast around the Sun, our years would only be 18 days long.

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How fast is the earth moving towards the Great Attractor?

Well, the largest motion we know of right now is that we are falling in towards something called the Great Attractor. And this is a concentration of mass, a giant cluster of galaxies. And right now, we're moving at a little over one and a half million miles an hour towards that part of the sky.

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What Really Is The Great Attractor?

27 related questions found

Is there something bigger than the Great Attractor?

The survey also confirmed earlier theories that the Milky Way galaxy is in fact being pulled toward a much more massive cluster of galaxies near the Shapley Supercluster, which lies beyond the Great Attractor, and which is called the Shapley Attractor.

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Could the Great Attractor be a black hole?

Originally Answered: Is the “Great Attractor” just another black hole of unimaginary gargantuan proportions? The Great Attractor has actually been explained now, and it's not by a supermassive black hole. The Great Attractor was a gravitational anomaly, as an immense mass seemed to pull on the Milky Way.

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Why is the Great Attractor scary?

Part of the reason the Great Attractor is so mysterious is that it happens to lie in a direction of the sky known as the “Zone of Avoidance”. This is in the general direction of the center of our galaxy, where there is so much gas and dust that we can't see very far in the visible spectrum.

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How big is the Great Attractor black hole?

It is estimated that the Great Attractor would have a diameter of about 300 million light-years and that its centre would lie about 147 million light-years away from Earth.

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What if the Great Attractor swallowed our galaxy?

together it would release more energy than we could ever imagine. but luckily we won't have to worry about that because these galaxies will probably never arrive at the same spot and collide. you see the Great Attractor is also being pulled deeper into space by other massive clusters.

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What is the biggest thing in the universe?

The biggest single entity that scientists have identified in the universe is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It's so wide that light takes about 10 billion years to move across the entire structure.

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Will the universe end at some point?

Trillions of years in the future, long after Earth is destroyed, the universe will drift apart until galaxy and star formation ceases. Slowly, stars will fizzle out, turning night skies black. All lingering matter will be gobbled up by black holes until there's nothing left.

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At what point will the universe stop expanding?

22 billion years in the future is the earliest possible end of the Universe in the Big Rip scenario, assuming a model of dark energy with w = −1.5. False vacuum decay may occur in 20 to 30 billion years if the Higgs field is metastable.

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Is space infinite?

Cosmologists aren't sure if the universe is infinitely big or just extremely large. To measure the universe, astronomers instead look at its curvature. The geometric curve on large scales of the universe tells us about its overall shape. If the universe is perfectly geometrically flat, then it can be infinite.

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Is Dark Flow real?

In astrophysics, dark flow is a theoretical non-random component of the peculiar velocity of galaxy clusters. The actual measured velocity is the sum of the velocity predicted by Hubble's Law plus a possible small and unexplained (or dark) velocity flowing in a common direction.

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Who created dark matter?

The term dark matter was coined in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology to describe the unseen matter that must dominate one feature of the universe—the Coma Galaxy Cluster.

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How will the universe end?

The ultimate fate of an open universe is either universal heat death, a "Big Freeze" (not to be confused with heat death, despite seemingly similar name interpretation ⁠; see §Theories about the end of the universe below), or a "Big Rip" – in particular dark energy, quintessence, and the Big Rip scenario – where the ...

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What is the biggest thing in the universe black hole?

It turns out that there is a theoretical limit to the size of black holes — celestial objects so massive that even light cannot escape them. And the largest directly observed black hole with a confirmed mass is right around this limit. This monster, appropriately named TON 618, weighs roughly 40 billion solar masses.

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What is the closest black hole to Earth?

The nearest known black hole is Gaia BH1, which was discovered in September 2022 by a team led by Kareem El-Badry. Gaia BH1 is 1,560 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.

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How many galaxies are in the Great Attractor?

Our galaxy, and 100,000 of our neighboring galaxies, are hurtling towards a massive point in the universe known as “The Great Attractor”. This region of space is about 220 million light years away and is what scientists call a gravitational anomaly.

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What is outside the universe?

The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.

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How heavy is the Great Attractor?

the observed velocities implied a mass of 5 x 1016 solar masses, a huge supercluster. This became known as the Great Attractor ( GA) model.

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Can a black hole take you to another world?

There is a long history to the idea that black holes may connect with other regions of the Universe, or other universes entirely, but this is purely speculation.

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Will a black hole ever reach Earth?

As gruesome as that fate is, that would still require a black hole to pass very close to Earth: so close that it's highly unlikely to ever occur.

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Is there another universe through a black hole?

Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe. In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.

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