We may not even notice this, but our planet revolves around the Sun at a speed of over 100,000 kilometers per hour. Moreover, our entire solar system moves inside the spiral arms of the Milky Way at a speed of 850 thousand kilometers per hour. At the same time, something makes the Milky Way itself move through the Universe at a speed of more than 2 million kilometers per hour. And scientists seem to have finally figured out exactly what.
Opposite us (our galaxy, to be precise), at a distance of about 650 million light years, lies a remarkably dense supercluster of galaxies called the Shapley Supercluster. And we are drawn straight to him. Behind us, scientists have discovered a previously undocumented region of space. The main oddity with this region is that the space of the local space is almost completely devoid of galaxies and … it pushes us towards the Shapley Supercluster with incredible force.
Cosmologist Yehuda Hoffman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his team have created a new three-dimensional map of the location of the nearest neighboring galaxies, and in it scientists have first identified the presence of the so-called "dead zone", called the Dipole Repeller (Dipole Repeller).
As you can see in the animation video below, our galaxy is right in the middle: the low-density Dipole Repeller pushes our Milky Way, while the superdense Shapley Supercluster pulls us towards it.
“By creating a three-dimensional map of the distribution of galaxies in space, we have found that our Milky Way is racing away from a huge and previously unknown region of low density. Since this area repels us rather than attracts us, we decided to call this region the Dipole Repeller,”explains Hoffman.
“Apart from the fact that our galaxy is repelled by the Dipole Repeller, it is also attracted towards the Shapley Supercluster region. These two forces govern our current position in outer space."
In the past, scientists have already suspected there was some low-density space behind our galaxy. However, although the Shapley Supercluster has an incredible mass (about 10,000 times the mass of the Milky Way), it is not able to independently attract our galaxy to itself with the speed with which the Milky Way is moving. Therefore, on this score, the researchers have questions and doubts. The Shapley Supercluster itself is the largest known concentration of matter in the local Universe. Its radius is about 1 billion light years.
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Given how laborious it is to search for possible exoplanets at least 4.25 light years away, not to mention those that may be several million light years away, figuring out all the details turned out to be a very difficult task for scientists.
“Past research over a decade ago has looked at the distribution of X-ray-emitting rich galactic clusters in space. And even then there were some hints of the existence of this "dead zone". However, the statistics at that time were not enough to come to any definite conclusion,”- says Brent Tully of the University of Hawaii and one of the participants in the new study.
Nevertheless, Hoffman and his team were able to figure out how more than 8000 galaxies closest to us, information about which was obtained using several ground-based observatories and space telescopes, including the Hubble telescope, are interconnected. And this information gave us the first real proof of the existence of the Great Dipole Repeller.
Considering all the impact on our galaxy, the general picture of what is happening looks like this:
Interestingly, according to information collected in the study of cosmic relic radiation (the so-called residual glow from the Big Bang), these two forces (the Attractor and the Repulsive) act on us (that is, pull and repel) with the same effort and are on the same line of sight (front and back) with the Milky Way.
Now that we have found the first evidence for the existence of the Dipole Repeller behind the Milky Way and our neighboring galaxies, the next step for scientists is to seek direct evidence to support this. In addition, we can talk not about one region, but about a whole set of superclusters and voids, which all together have an impact on our galaxy, pushing it towards the Shapley Supercluster.
How all this will end in the end - no one knows. However, some near-term prospects can be viewed now. In about 4 billion years, our Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Nebula. The approach speed is 140 kilometers per second. Astronomers from the International Center for Radio Astronomy even created a film on this occasion and decided to show what an intergalactic cataclysm would look like, as a result of which a new supergiant galaxy will be formed, which scientists have already named - Milkomeda.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK