Astronomers May Have Solved Mystery of ‘Great Attractor’
From Times staff and wire reports
Astronomers say they have solved one of cosmology’s minor mysteries by finding the galaxy at the center of the “Great Attractor,” a giant mass of galaxies that sends other galaxies wobbling. A team from France, South Africa and New Mexico said astronomers have been mystified by findings that nearby galaxies are not speeding off into space at uniform velocities.
These deviations indicate the presence of the Great Attractor--a large concentration of mass (equivalent to 5 million billion suns) that lies in the direction of the southern Milky Way. The report in the Feb. 8 edition of Nature says that the Great Attractor is most likely a galaxy cluster called Abell 3627, which is extremely massive but partially masked by dust and other galaxies.
