What is the Great Attractor?

Question

Is it a celestial object or a space anomaly, where is it located and what are its characteristics? Thanks!

Answer 1

In the 1980s, a group of astronomers known as the "Seven Samurai" (David Burstein, Roger Davies, Alan Dressler, Sandra Faber, Donald Lynden-Bell, Roberto J. Terlevich, and Gary Wegner) found that galaxies are very unevenly distributed in space, with galactic superclusters separated by incredibly huge voids of visible ordinary matter. The Great Attractor is one such structure, a diffuse concentration of matter some 400 million light-years in size located around 250 million light-years (ly) away in the direction of the southern Constellation Centaurus, about seven degrees off the plane of the Milky Way -- at a redshift-distance of 4,350 kilometers (or around 2,700 miles) per second. It lies in the so-called Zone of Avoidance, where the dust and stars of the Milky Way's disk obscures as much as a quarter of the Earth's visible sky.

Answer 2

The Great Attractor is a gravity anomaly, about 200 million light-years away, in the direction of the Hydra and Centaurus constellations. It appears to be a concentration of 10,000's of galaxies, or the mass equivalent. It was discovered in 1986. It is hard to study because the Milky way gets in the way.

Answer 3

The Great Magnet, located on the door of the Great Refrigerator.

Answer 4

Some unknown body that creates an immense gravitational field, in which our galaxy revolves around, creating our galactic cluster.

It might be dark energy.

Answer 5

It's a collection of mass in space which is inferred by it's gravitational effect on other bodies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor