Eli5: What is the great attrctor and laniakea?
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Laniakea is a Hawaiian word meaning ‘Great skies’
It is also the name given to the super cluster of Galaxies that includes our own.
The Great Attractor is a name given to a gravitational anomaly, a point in space that seems to be pulling everything else towards it. We can tell through observation than much of the Laniakea super cluster seems to be moving towards this point in space but we don’t know what that is.
The problem with the so called great attractor is that we can’t see it because our view of it is blocked. It sits directly across the center of our galaxy from us so our own galactic center blocks the view.
The current working theory is that there is a very dense cluster of galaxies there pulling everything else towards it.
But more recent observations seem to show that it is not as big as we thought. While there is a lot of mass there, there’s something even bigger behind it that is adding to the overall pull. So the great attractor might be a series of galactic clusters working together in a chain.
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