The Great Attractor

The Great Attractor is a gravitational anomaly, located in the Laniakea supercluster, that drags galaxies within a radius of more than 300 million light-years away.
Laniakea, made up of more than 100,000 galaxies, contains the Virgo Supercluster, home to our Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way.
All of these galaxies are redshifted, according to Hubble's law, as if they were moving away from us, but the variations in their redshift are enough to reveal the existence of a concentration of mass equivalent to tens of thousands of galaxies. In fact, there are galaxies found just behind that hypermassive zone that, due to the colossal gravitational attraction exerted on them, present a blue shift.
The Great Attractor itself is moving towards the Shapley supercluster. Astronomical surveys conducted in the 2010s by a team of South African astrophysicists revealed a supercluster of galaxies, called the Vela Supercluster, at the theoretical location of the Great Attractor.
Category:Gravitational
Category:Space