As you know, after the Big Bang and the subsequent development of events, matter was distributed almost evenly in all directions, at least so scientists believed until recently, until they discovered a strange anomaly known as the "Great Attractor", which is a huge accumulation of matter, which has a noticeably higher average density compared to neighboring regions of the visible part of the Universe.
By the mid-eighties of the last century, astronomers found that galaxies forming local groups scatter together. Our magnificent Milky Way, together with the group of galaxies in Virgo, to which it belongs, together with the giant supercluster of galaxies in the Hair of Veronica, together with other neighboring metagalactic objects, flies at a speed of about six hundred kilometers per second in the direction of some incomprehensible, but colossally powerful center of mass. Already the first calculations showed that the total gravity of this formation is approximately the same as that of an object with a mass of several tens of thousands of such large galaxies as ours or the neighboring Andromeda nebula.
A perceptible part of the region of the Universe visible to us is continuously drawn into this strange gravitational funnel, where a truly gigantic amount of matter has already accumulated, even by cosmic standards, which is difficult even to imagine. If I try to use an analogy, then we can say that the substance in the center of our galaxy is also inevitably slipping into a giant black hole located in its core.
American astrophysicist Alan Dressler gave the name to this invisible all-consuming object, he called it the Great Attractor, or the Great Source of Attraction (English "attraction" means "gravity").
According to modern concepts, the Great Attractor is a gravitational anomaly of an obscure nature, located at a distance of about 250 million light years from us in the constellation Nagon, presumably a huge supercluster of galaxies. Its mass reaches approximately 5 x 10-16 degrees of solar masses.
There is ongoing debate about the origin of this object. There is an assumption, for example, that this is the "Cosmic String", a supermassive relict formation that appeared at the time of the early Universe, a kind of thread-like anomaly, curvature of space-time. However, so far this theory has not been confirmed and scientists believe that this is just a supercluster of galaxies, formed randomly, although it remains unclear why such a “randomness” is observed only in one part of the Universe …
The question is also fueled by the fact that the mass of all galaxies observed in the attractor is clearly not enough to explain the observed effect. Most likely, there are still some unknown supermassive structures that are part of the Great Attractor, but scientists are not yet able to find them. As an option, the assumption is considered that an enormous amount of dark matter has been concentrated there, also so far known to astronomers only theoretically. At the same time, even if such a theory is confirmed, the question will remain open why dark matter accumulated there, and not somewhere else, or why it is not evenly distributed at all.
So how did the giant clusters of galaxies appear that led to the appearance of the Great Attractor?.. The only force that structured and ordered all matter after the Big Bang was gravity. However, at metagalactic distances, this force is very weak, and until it brings everything to the appropriate state, it will take too much time.
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After the appearance of super-powerful computers, they tried to simulate similar processes on a computer. As a result, the output received two options, both of which ultimately gave a negative answer to the question. In the first variant of the solution, all cosmic structures - superclusters and clusters of galaxies, as well as individual galaxies - appeared, but this took a very long time, which did not correspond to observations. In the second case, only galaxies and their clusters were formed, but no "Great Attractor" arose.
Simulation results have led to new scientific speculations. For example, Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén put forward the idea that there is another interaction in physics that is still unknown to us.
Or maybe there is an invisible supermassive black hole there? A colossal relict clot of matter that collapsed at the beginning of the star formation era or the remnants of the earliest, very first galaxies that were absorbed by their nuclei, and then merged, forming one center of mass?
Or maybe it is even more interesting and this is the very point where our Universe will eventually have to "collapse" in order to then begin a new life cycle?
EUGENY RADUGIN
