The mysterious ‘Great Attractor' is pulling the Milky Way galaxy off course. No matter what you're doing right now—sitting, standing, walking—you're moving.
Specifically, you're moving at least four different ways. First, the Earth is turning very fast while it's in space, going about 1,000 miles per hour, or 1,600 kilometers per hour. This turning makes our days and nights. Next, the Earth and the other planets are going around the sun. We move at about 67, 000 miles per hour, or 108;000 kilometers per hour. This movement makes our seasons and years. Also, the sun and everything around it is going around the middle of our galaxy(星系), the Milky Way, really fast, over 500,000 miles per hour, or 828,000 kilometers per hour. Plus, everything in the universe is always getting bigger as it spreads out.
But a long time ago, in the 1970s, space experts saw that something was different about the galaxies close to us, called the Local Group. These galaxies were being pulled away from their normal path really fast, towards something we couldn't see. They named this place the Great Attractor, but it's hard to learn more about it because we can't see it well.
"The Milky Way has so many stars and dust, which hides the information we want to see in that direction. So our galaxy is hiding the Great Attractor," says Jorge Moreno, a space expert at a college. This place we can't see is called the Zone of Avoidance by people who study space. We still don't know everything about why the Milky Way and the other galaxies are being pulled off course, but there have been some ideas. The newest idea is a very big group of galaxies called Laniakea, which means "big sky" in Hawaiian. Want to know more about space secrets? Send us an email at shortwave@ npr. org.
