2023-05-27 12:07:19
- Alejandro Millan Valencia
- BBC News World
Photo credit, Getty Images
In the universe there are many forces at work that we don’t yet know about, such as dark energy.
A common exercise in school homework was to represent our solar system in the form of a model.
Thanks to this exercise, we know that the solar system is a set of planets that revolve around the big golden star. But in these models, the sun was static and floated in the vastness.
However, astronomers have been pointing out for decades that the solar system, and especially our galaxy, the Milky Way, moves through the vastness of the universe at a speed of about 600 kilometers per second.
And we have known for a long time that this journey has a destination.
Discoveries made in the 1970s by a group of astronomers determined the existence of a “great force” whose source would be the destination of the galaxy’s current voyage.
This force has been called the “Great Attractor”.
“Our galaxy is moving towards something we cannot see clearly. The focal point of this movement is the Great Attractor, the result of billions of years of cosmic evolution,” cosmologist Paul Sutter, professor of science, told BBC Mundo. Astrophysics at Stony Brooks University in New York.
Photo credit, Getty Images
Image of the Great Attractor site taken by the Hubble telescope.
And despite the impressive speed at which our galaxy travels, it will probably never reach the destination set by the Great Attractor.
“We will never reach our destination because in a few billion years the accelerating force of dark energy will destroy the universe,” says Sutter.
Dark energy, NASA explains, is a mysterious force permeating the cosmos and accelerating the expansion of the universe.
This means that the galaxies are moving further and further apart, until, billions of years from now, the structure of the universe as we know it today is destroyed.
Understanding the effects of the Great Attractor is therefore part of the quest to understand the structure of the universe.
“In the study of the universe it is very important to know how it is organized, why it is organized from structures that have certain dimensions, and knowing each of them and their dimensions helps us a lot in this endeavor,” Carlos Augusto Molina, a Colombian astrophysicist who works at the Bogota planetarium, told BBC Mundo.
As space exploration progressed, thanks in large part to the Hubble telescope sent into space in the second half of the 20th century, astronomers were faced with the challenge of somehow organizing other everything they saw.
A kind of map started to be drawn and, of course, one of the key points was to know where our solar system and our galaxy are in the universe.
“Around the 1970s, we started studying the motion of our solar system and our galaxy, and we compared it with the motion of other nearby galaxies, and everything seemed to be going in the same direction, that of the expansion of the universe,” says Sutter.
Photo credit, Getty Images
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is heading towards where the Great Attractor is.
“However, astronomers began to notice something curious: there seemed to be a vague directionality on top of this expansive motion, as if all the galaxies near us were also heading towards the same focal point,” he adds. he.
For many astronomers, this “directionality” was related to flaws in observations or other factors that contributed to misinterpretation of the information they received.
But telescopes continued to improve their technologies, and around 1986 science was able to determine that the nearest galaxies, including ours, were heading in a common direction.
“With these new instruments, astronomers were able to determine not only that we were heading towards a concentration of matter, but also the speed at which we were doing so. In other words, they were able to establish with great certainty what it was,” says Molina.
In this sense, although it cannot be determined exactly, one of the main theories suggests that the Great Attractor is a large structure of dark matter located in the supercluster of galaxies known as Laniakea, which has the ability to attract galaxies within a radius of about 300 million light-years.
Dark matter is another enigmatic component of the universe.
It is a type of matter that we cannot observe, but which we only have the intuition that it exists because of the gravitational effect it exerts on objects in the cosmos.
This large concentration of matter that brings galaxies together has been called the “Great Attractor”, which lies about 200 million light-years from Earth.
One of the reasons Sutter has dedicated himself to studying the Great Attractor further is that, despite advances in astronomical observation, this superstructure remains a mystery.
Photo credit, Getty Images
The Great Attractor is about 200 million light-years from our galaxy.
“One of the big drawbacks of knowing more about the Great Attractor is that it’s in a very uncomfortable position: totally opposite our galaxy,” he says.
“When we try to observe, there is a lot of noise: many stars, planets, nebulae on the way which do not allow a more complete analysis of this force which attracts us.”
It’s not a black hole
Both Sutter and Molina are clear that the Great Attractor is not a black hole, pointing out that it is a gravitational anomaly.
“It’s a totally different force and there’s no connection to the black holes in the universe,” Sutter says.
The truth is that by being able to determine it, it was also possible to establish that there were other similar anomalies in other parts of the universe that would have a similar function: to attract galaxies.
“Knowing this helps us in a fundamental task to understand the universe: how it is made up of these structures that we classify or prioritize according to their gravitational capacity”, explains Molina.
For Molina, “mapping” the universe is achieved by learning more about how these areas interact with other forces, such as light or gravity.
Photo credit, Getty Images
The Great Attractor takes us on a journey whose final destination we may not reach.
“Knowing this structure allows us to compare how processes such as interaction with light – or its absence – or its density occur in similar structures in other galaxies in the universe,” he adds.
Another important aspect is that it allows us to study the “future” of our space environment.
“Knowing how fast our galaxy is moving and where it is going allows us to think about or study aspects of its future behavior,” Sutter notes.
However, while through these advances we know the fate of this galaxy journey, we also know that Earth or our solar system may not be able to see the end.
“There’s another very powerful force in the universe that we call dark energy, which is the complete opposite of gravity: instead of pulling, it pushes,” Sutter explains.
“It’s for this reason that when we get really close to the Great Attractor a few million light-years away, this dark energy, which we know very little about, is going to have an effect on this journey, which is most likely the destruction of everything we know”, concludes the scientist.
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