Are we all being swallowed up by The Great Attractor?

The Great Attractor is a major mystery in cosmology and refers to an enormous gravitational field that appears to act on galaxies in much of the universe. It was discovered in the 1970s when astronomers noticed that galaxies, including our own Milky Way, are all moving at high speeds to a point in the universe, about 150 to 250 million light years away, towards the constellation Centaurus.

Exactly what this object or area is remains a mystery. The Great Attractor has a massive gravitational force, which suggests that a gigantic amount of matter must be present. Some scientists suspect it's an enormous “supercluster” — a gigantic group of galaxies, much larger than the average clusters we know.

One complication in studying the Great Attractor is that it is located behind the so-called “Galactic Plane” of the Milky Way, a dense region full of stars, gas and dust that blocks telescopes' view. This makes it difficult to see exactly what is going on there right away.

However, later research has shown that there may be something bigger ahead, known as the Shapley Supercluster , which may have even more influence on the movement of galaxies than the Great Attractor. Yet the nature of the Great Attractor remains largely unknown, and it poses a fascinating mystery to astronomers trying to understand how gravity works on a cosmic scale.