Our cosmic neighbourhood is far from a quiet place. While humans feel stationary on Earth, in reality they are passengers on a high-speed journey through the vacuum of space.
Just imagine you slept last night completely motionless and you woke up where you were last night. But the galaxy shifted millions of kilometers through the cosmos.
This is what is happening with the Milky Way Galaxy which is currently racing through space at 600 kilometres per second, roughly 1.3 million miles per hour.
Surprisingly, the galaxy is moving along with billions of planets, stars, and surrounding galaxies.
Now the question arises: what mysterious force is pulling the Milky Way Galaxy and where we are heading in this journey.
For decades, astronomers have known we are being pulled by something immense, yet mysterious force. It is an enigmatic gravitational titan known as the Great Attractor, which is pulling our galaxy.
Great Attractor: Inexplicable cosmic mystery
The Great Attractor is a gravitational anomaly located at about 250 million light-years away in the direction of the Centaurus and Hydra constellations.
What makes the Great Attractor “cosmically mysterious” is its existence in the “Zone of Avoidance”, an area of the sky obscured by the Milky Way’s own star and interstellar dust.
The Great Attractor is not a single object like a giant black hole; in fact, it is the anchor in the Laniakea Supercluster, a vast continent of galaxies.
Home to approximately 100,000 galaxies, the Laniakea Supercluster is a cosmic web bound by gravity and drawn toward the Great Attractor.
Milky Way Galaxy is not just being pulled
The researchers have always believed that the Milky Way Galaxy is always being pulled. Here is the twist, it is also being pushed as reported in a new study.
Both our galaxy and the Great Attractor are being pulled toward an even larger mass called the Shapley Concentration, which lies 600 million light years beyond the Great Attractor.
In a new study published in Nature Astronomy and led by Prof. Yehuda Hoffman at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the researchers found a previously unknown and gigantic region in our extragalactic neighbourhood, which exerts a repelling force on our Local Group of galaxies.
“By 3-d mapping the flow of galaxies through space, we found that our Milky Way galaxy is speeding away from a large, previously unidentified region of low density. Because it repels rather than attracts, we call this region the Dipole Repeller,” said Prof. Yehuda Hoffman.
“In addition to being pulled towards the known Shapley Concentration, we are also being pushed away from the newly discovered Dipole Repeller. Thus it has become apparent that push and pull are of comparable importance at our location.” Hoffman added.
