Every time we imagine the universe, it is a dark expanse and an indeterminate destination that comes to mind. But if everything that moves goes somewhere, how can we imagine where the thousands of galaxies, including the Milky Way, are heading? Astronomers have been indicating for decades that the solar system is moving through the universe at about 600 kilometers per second, but what is striking now is that this trip seems to have a predetermined destination.
In the 1970s, a force called the Great Attractor was still identified as the destination of the galaxy’s journey.
According to cosmologist Paul Sutter, professor of astrophysics at Stony Brooks University in New York, the galaxy is heading towards something we cannot clearly identify, and the focal point of this movement is the Great Attractor, the product of billions of years of cosmic evolution.
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However, according to the astronomers involved in this complex study, it is very likely that our galaxy will not reach the goal set by the Great Attractor, despite the impressive speed at which it is moving. But why ? According to Sutter, we will never reach our goal because the accelerating force of dark energy will destroy the universe in a few billion years.
Is there an end to the universe?
What could be the dark energy that NASA talks about? It is a mysterious force that permeates the cosmos and accelerates the expansion of the universe, but even if it is very complex, it is responsible, in translation, the increasing distance of galaxies from each other, with a tendency towards the complete destruction, in billions of years, of the structure of the universe as we know it today.
Carlos Augusto Molina, a Colombian astrophysicist working at the Bogotá Planetarium, told BBC Mundo: “In exploring the universe it is very important to know how it is organized, why it is made up of structures of certain sizes , and knowledge of the individual structures and their size is very helpful in this regard”.
We know that space exploration has made great progress and more and more impressive discoveries are being made. This is largely due to the Hubble telescope.
In the 1970s we started studying the motion of our solar system and our galaxy and comparing it to the motion of other nearby galaxies, and everything seemed to be going in the same direction as the expansion of the universe.
Many assumptions have been made on the direction of these thousands of galaxies, what force drew them in a certain direction? Well, for many scientists it could be related to errors in observations or other factors that led to misinterpretation of the information obtained, but as technology has improved, it was scientifically proven around 1986 that the nearest galaxies, including our own, were moving in a common direction.
The Great Attractor
Now, if science has proven there’s a target, what would be the force of attraction for this point? Molina also pointed out that with these new instruments, astronomers could not only determine that we were moving towards a concentration of matter, but also the speed at which we were doing it. In other words, they were able to determine with certainty what was going on.
In fact, it is still not possible to say precisely, but one of the main theories put forward by scientists leads to the belief that the Great Attractor is a large structure of dark matter located within the supercluster of galaxies known as Laniakea, which has the ability to attract galaxies within a radius of about 300 million light-years.
One of the many mysterious components of the universe is dark matter which, although it cannot be observed, intuitively exists because of the gravitational effect it exerts on objects in the cosmos. This great concentration of matter, which attracts galaxies, creates a force called the Great Attractor, located about 200 million light-years from Earth.
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This apparent, though intuitive, megastructure remains a great enigma of the universe, which prompts Sutter to continue to be interested in the Great Attractor.
One of the reasons why Sutter devoted himself to the study of the Great Attractor is the fact that this superstructure remains an enigma despite the progress of astronomical observation. But he already knows there’s a major downside to wanting to know more about him: as far as we know, the Great Attractor is on the opposite side of our galaxy.
According to Sutter, there is a lot of noise when they try to make observations, because they encounter many stars, planets, nebulae in between, which does not allow a more complete analysis of this force which attracts us.
