This may have been posted before, but if not, it is quite compelling and timely as well.



This, the largest mass yet viewed by the human eye, is an image of galaxies. There are only 6 stars in the image within our own Milky Way. Everything else is a galaxy.

There are millions of them in this image, and they are all, including our own Milky Way Galaxy, rushing at 5,500,000 miles per hour (this may seem impossibly fast, but the speed of light, SoL, is 670,615,200 MPH) to a place called 'The Great Attractor', as pictured above. What it is, is virtually unknown and how and why it has such an overwhelming effect in the Universe and in our region of the observable Universe, on so many galaxies and super clusters of galaxies, all rushing to some unknown place and force, is less understood than ever before.

It just is. No one knows why and no one can guess what is the core makeup of The Great Attractor and how it can do what it does. There are no physics models to explain it, even in theory.

For starters, its gravitational pull, the weak force and the weakest force in the cosmos, is beyond anything yet known for sheer influence. Whatever it is and however it is able to effect so much mass on such a gigantic scale is anyone's guess.

And on the other side of this Great Barrier, commonly called "The Wall', is as many galaxies all rushing towards it, or towards us, in the same fashion and speed, in the opposite direction. This includes even the giant Shapley Super Cluster on the other side of the The Great Attactor.

Its core effect as far as it can be discerned--the most faintest points in the image, indicating the farthest away galaxies, lie at about 200,000,000 light years distant from Earth. The entire region of effect for The Great Attractor is so large it actually takes up nearly 1/5 of the visible universe, as known at this time. And further, it is postulated that the Universe may have 4 of these Attractors. But what are they?

Some of the known answers are quite compelling. First, the speed we are traveling towards The Great Attractor is 0.08% the speed of light (SoL). At this speed we are being effected by 'time' as well as mass and location. With this, it infers we are being effected in ways we cannot know at this time. It way well be a corridor into another Universe, different than wormhole theory or the like.

And so much of The Great Attractor is blocked from origin view by an area known only as 'The Great Avoidance Zone'.

Additionally, the sheer magnitude of this thing(s) and why it is there, wrecks all other neatly learned understandings of the formation of the Universe, in Planck Time. (10^21 = 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of a second) when the Big Bang occurred and why these things would be a part of that creation. Suffice to say, the JWST (the replacement for HST, the James Webb Space Telescope) will tells us much more, but till then, this and the other 4 Attractors, are the biggest vexing puzzle in the cosmos today for our known time-place.

http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/greatatt.htm

Comments and thoughts welcome.

RAMS

and i thought that the universe are actually moving farther apart and the reason they move apart because of the " Dark Matter " ( this is only a theory )

That was a great article. I've been so fascinated with The Great Attractor for a long time now. Thanks for posting it!!

On average everything in the universe is moving apart, however there are "local" areas where objects are moving towards each other.

The reason that the objects are moving apart is because space itself is expanding. This is a direct result of the big bang.

Dark matter is theorised because the behaviour of galaxies can not be explained without it. If you add together all the mass we can observe, stars, planets, dust gas etc, there is no where near enough to expain the way that galaxies rotate. Thus the theory is that the vast majority of mass in the univers is "dark matter" which we can't currently observe directly. Rather than causing the universe to expand dark matter should help slow this expansion down and maybe even, eventually, cause it to contract and collapse. However recent observations have suggested that the expansion, rather than slowing down, may actually be speeding up. Some scientist have proposed that there is a form of "dark energy" which has a kind of anti-gravity effect.

when the galaxy reach one point of the Great Attractor wouldn't it cause destruction due to compression of galaxies and would collapse?

I'm not sure what would happen, however I doubt that it would be destruction in the way that I think you mean.

Galaxies are not solid objects and so they aren't destroyed by collisions. They can be disrupted and they can merge but the individual stars within the galaxies are not destoyed.

I suspect that there would be mergers of galaxies leading to one or several huge "super" galaxies. What I also don't know is how long it will be before all the galaxies reach the point of the Greater Attractor. If the process takes long enough then all the stars in the galaxies would already have died by the time they collide.

yeah i also thought about that. but the huge cluster of stars that rotate on a phenomenal huge black hole in the center of each of the galaxy. what would happen if they met? center of galaxy + another center of galaxy = ? ,

And people think we are alone. There must be millions of Galaxies in that pic alone.

~Thanato

Quite right Waspie.

Cosmology is a fascinating topic. If the third dimension is taken into account, the universe looks like soap bubbles, with few or no galaxies inside the voids. The strings of superclusters form where the bubbles intersect. If anti-matter has anti-gravity, some things could be explained, including dark energy. As particles spiraled into the no-boundary center of a black hole or a quasar, they would shed energy as pairs of particles and anti-particles. If anti-matter has anti-gravity (and there is no experiment to the contrary) it would be accelerated straight out the poles (relatively free of particles) and accelerated to close to the speed of light. This would account for the fountain of positrons in the center of our galaxy, and it would account for the mysterious jets emitted by quasars. A quasar could easily produce both positrons and anti-protons or anti-neutrons, which could combine as neutral anti-hydrogen, which would be transparent and invisible unless they encounter ordinary matter. The bubbles could be filled with anti-hyrogen and this repellent force could account for the temporary acceleration in the Hubble expansion. I say temporary, because in a few billion years, mixing would annhilate the anti-hydrogen and the repellent force of anti-gravity would cease.

WIMPs are being looked for in observatories in deep mines around the world...in 4 or 5 places. None found.
I wonder if we must ask whether dark matter consists in particles or not. It is not strange that it has matter, but it is strange that dark matter does not interact with other dark matter except by gravity. Even neutrinos can interact with each other, extremely rarely, via the weak nuclear force.

~~~Cebrakon