What is the Great Attractor, where thousands of galaxies are headed

Discoveries made in the 1970s by a group of astronomers determined the existence of a “superpower” whose source would be the destination of the journey the galaxy is currently making. This force was called the Great Attractor.

cosmologist Paul Sutter, professor of astrophysics at Stony Brooks University in New York, explains to BBC Mundo (BBC Spanish service).

And despite the incredible speed at which our galaxy is traveling, it is likely that it will not reach the destination set by the Great Attractor.

“We will never reach our destination because in a few billion years, the accelerating force of dark energy will destroy the universe,” Sutter explains.

Dark energy, as NASA explains, is a mysterious force permeating the universe and accelerating the expansion of the universe.

This translates to galaxies moving further and further away from each other, until in billions of years the structure of the universe as we know it today is destroyed.

Therefore, understanding the effects of the great attractor is relevant to efforts to understand the structure of the universe.

“Within the study of the universe, it is very important to know how it is organized, why it is arranged from structures of certain sizes, and knowing each of them and their size helps a lot in this endeavor,” says Carlos Augusto, a Colombian astrophysicist who works at the Bogotá Planetarium, for BBC Mundo.

As space exploration has advanced, thanks in large part to the launch of the Hubble telescope in the second half of the 20th century, astronomers have faced the challenge of organizing everything they see in some way.

Some kind of maps began to be drawn up, and, of course, one of the key points was to find out where our solar system and galaxy are located in the universe.

“Around the 1970s, we began to study the motion of our solar system, the motion of our galaxy, and compared it to the motion of other nearby galaxies, and everything seemed to be moving in the same direction as the expansion of the universe,” Souter explains.

“However, astronomers are beginning to notice something curious: There seems to be a mysterious trend behind this expansionary motion, as if all the galaxies close to us are also heading towards the same focal point,” he adds.

For many astronomers, this “trend” had to do with flaws in observations or other factors that led to a misreading of the information they received.

But telescopes were improving their technology, and around 1986, science was able to determine that the nearest galaxies, including our own, were heading in a common direction.

“With these new tools, astronomers could determine not only that we were moving toward a concentration of matter, but also how fast we were doing it. In other words, they were able to establish with certainty what it was,” notes Molina.

In this sense, although it cannot be determined exactly, one of the main theories points to the fact that the Great Attractor is a large structure of dark matter located within a supercluster of galaxies known as Laniakea It has the ability to attract galaxies in a radius of more or less than 300 million light-years.

Dark matter is another mysterious component of the universe.

It is a kind of unobservable matter, and one can only sense its existence due to the gravitational effect it exerts on things in the universe.

This large concentration of matter dragging galaxies was called the Great Attractor, located about 200 million light-years from Earth.

One of the reasons Sutter is dedicated to studying more of the Great Attractor is that despite advances in astronomical observation, this superstructure remains a mystery.

“One of the big drawbacks to learning more about the Great Attractor is that it is located in a very inconvenient position: right on the other side of our galaxy,” he says.

“When we try to observe there is a lot of noise: many stars and planets and nebulae in the middle that do not allow a more complete analysis of this force that attracts us.”

Sutter and Molina explain that the Great Attractor is not a black hole, pointing out that it is a gravitational anomaly.

“It’s a completely different force and there’s no connection to black holes in the universe,” Sutter says.

The fact is that by being able to determine this, it was also possible to establish that there are other similar anomalies in other parts of the universe that would have a similar function: galactic clouds.

“Knowing this helps us with a fundamental task of understanding the universe: how it is made of these structures that we categorize or arrange according to their gravitational potential,” says Molina.

For Molina, “mapping” the universe is done by learning more about how these regions interact with other forces, such as light or gravity.

“Knowing this structure allows us to compare how processes such as interaction with light – or lack of it – or its intensity occur in similar structures in other galaxies in the universe,” he adds.

Another important aspect is that it allows us to study the “future” of our space environment.

“Knowing how fast our galaxy is moving and where it is heading allows us to think about or study aspects of how it will behave in the future,” Sutter notes.

However, while we know from these developments the destination of this galactic journey, we also know that Earth or our solar system may not be able to see the end.

“There’s another very strong force in the universe that we call dark energy, and it’s the exact opposite of gravity: instead of pulling, it pushes,” says Sutter.

“So when we actually approach the Great Attractor within a few million light-years from now, this dark energy, which we know so little about, will have an effect on that trip, which will very likely be the destruction of everything we know.” The scientist concluded.