Shapley Supercluster

Hello!

Before we start, I just want to say that this will be the last blog for quite sometime due to my upcoming exams, so I hope you can understand. With that out of the way...

If you read my articles, you probably know about the Boötes Void, one of the largest empty regions in space. Let's suppose you are teleported back into the Boötes Void. After what seems like eternity, you find a cluster of galaxies. Finally!

But something is off...

For starters, it seems to be much denser than normal; like much, much denser. And, it seems to attract everything from all corners. This supercluster that you are seeing is the "Shapley Supercluster", one of the largest superclusters in our local universe. It is 650 million light years away from Earth, making it impossible to see with the naked eye; and is located in the constellation Centaurus.

The most interesting property about the Shapley Supercluster is that due to its gravity, it is attracting everything in its vicinity, including the Milky Way. Due to this, the super dense center of the Shapley Supercluster is known as the Shapley Attractor. Think of it as a giant magnet in space, which pulls everything towards the center. It is so dense that it creates an illusion where we perceive that low density areas, such as voids are repelling us. The nearest "repeller" to the Milky Way has been termed the Dipole Repeller, which would the next topic on this website!

With that, the Milky Way is moving towards the Shapley Supercluster at an average speed of 630 km/s, relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background! That means, when we are sitting, we are moving through space in a super fast velocity, even when we do not notice it!

The picture below shows a map of the major galaxies in the supercluster.

Thanks for reading!

And bye!