The Milky Way is racing toward a mysterious region of space at 1.3 million miles per hour.

The Great Attractor is a gravitational anomaly located in intergalactic space at the center of the Laniakea Supercluster. It was first identified in the 1970s and 1980s when astronomers noticed that the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies were not expanding outward at the expected uniform rate. Instead, these galaxies are being pulled toward a specific region roughly 250 million light-years away in the direction of the Centaurus and Hydra constellations.This region has a mass equivalent to tens of thousands of Milky Ways. It exerts a massive gravitational pull on the Local Group and the Virgo Supercluster, drawing them in at speeds of approximately 600 kilometers per second. Despite its immense size, the Great Attractor remained a mystery for decades because it lies in the Zone of Avoidance. This is an area of the sky obscured by the gas and dust of our own Milky Way galaxy, which blocks about 20% of the optical light from the distant universe.Modern advancements in X-ray and radio astronomy have allowed researchers to peer through this dust. Observations from the Parkes Observatory in Australia and the Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed large clusters of galaxies, such as the Norma Cluster, lurking in this region. While the Great Attractor is powerful, recent studies suggest it is actually part of an even larger structure called the Shapley Supercluster. This larger concentration of mass is located about 650 million light-years away and provides an even stronger pull on our cosmic neighborhood.