The Great Attractor

What we've been able to discover about our place in the universe is nothing short of astounding. We've gone from the then completely understandable notion of us living on a stationary flat plane in the center of the universe, to the now completely understandable notion of us living on a spinning ball that's speeding through a universe without a center.

_{source: Wikipedia}

But still, what we don't know still outweighs what we know; with every new discovery, new questions automatically arise. And there's no end to the discussion if we're even equipped, if anything can even be equipped to understand everything; we may never know the true nature of reality. Take the Big Bang theory for example; this is based, as prescribed by the scientific method, on theory being constantly confirmed by observations. Hubble observed other galaxies moving away from us. Einstein built his theory of general relativity around the common knowledge of his time; a stable universe, a non-expanding universe. For his equations to "produce" that stability, he had to fudge the numbers and he did so by adding what he called the cosmological constant.

So when news of Hubble's discovery reached Einstein, he admitted that this cosmological constant was his greatest blunder. But he shouldn't have. In the words of famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I'm paraphrasing here, Einstein's greatest blunder was actually declaring that the cosmological constant was his greatest blunder. You see, when years later we learned that not only is space expanding, but that the expansion is speeding up over time, Einstein's equations "produced" the universe we actually observe when the cosmological constant is re-inserted; it corresponds with what we now call the vacuum energy of space.

All the discoveries about the universe we live in have brought us to the realization that most of the universe is currently unknown to us; everything we can observe, everything that's made of matter and energy as we know it, makes up only 5 percent of the total mass and energy of the universe, the rest is called dark matter and dark energy. How do we know that they exist? By observing and applying the laws of physics that have been tested over and over and over again. Through Newton's and Einstein's laws of gravity, we can calculate at what speed a planet of a certain mass must move for it to maintain a stable orbit around a star; if the planet moves slower, it would fall towards the star, if it moved faster, it would move away from the star, and if it moved fast enough, it would escape the star's gravity and wander off into interstellar space.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

Now, when astrophysicists observed the rotation speeds of stars at the edge of a galaxy, they realized these stars moved way too fast; accounting for the mass of the stars in the galaxy they orbit, these stars would have been flung into intergalactic space millions of years ago. Approximately 66 percent of the mass needed to produce the observed stable orbit was missing. Dark matter is the hypothesized "stuff" to account for the missing mass; scientists postulate the existence of an unknown substance, field or particle, something that doesn't interact with light in any range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The Hubble flow, which describes the motion of galaxies due solely to the expansion of the Universe, combined with our extensive knowledge of gravity's influence on all movement of mass in space, give us a pretty good picture of our place in, and movement through space, and we can even take into account the unseen forces of dark matter and dark energy. Armed with all this knowledge however, we still have to contend with yet another unseen, unknowable force; the Great Attractor. Using the same observational technique as used to discover dark matter, the existence of many objects in our own solar system were predicted before they were observed; Neptune for example was predicted to exist because of it's gravitational effects of Uranus. Now, on a much larger scale, scientists predict the existence of this mysterious Great Attractor because of it's gravitational effect on all the galaxies residing in our local cluster of galaxies.

We can not look directly at this unknown mass, because it lies in the region of space we call the Zone of Avoidance; the area of the sky that is obscured by the Milky Way, behind the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, which is approximately 20 percent of the sky. But we've deduced that it's between 200 and 250 million light-years away, and it has a mass of 100,000 times the mass of the Milky Way..! Like I said at the start of this post; I find it astounding how far we've come in our understanding of our place in the universe. And all that by thinking and observing, but mostly thinking, given how limited we really are in observing and given the immense scale of the universe itself and it's complexity. To get a sense of the scale, but also a sense of how we've been able to get a handle on that scale, please watch the short video; the creator, Anton Petrov, uses a computer game, a simulation, to show us where the Great Attractor is relative to us in space, as well as some other, even bigger attractors:

_{The Great Attractor - Mystery of the Universe}

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