Keith Nagel writes > Yes, this is the Great Attractor. All mass in the visible > sky is streaming towards that point in Leo. Bonus points for anyone with > an explanation of how this is possible with Hubble expansion? > Does one really preclude the other?
Not really "all mass" in the visible sky, unless you mean "visible to the naked eye" - only the mass which is blue-shifted wrt to our solar system is moving towards the great attractor. Or else, Keith is subtly telling us that he is a "house of mirrors" proponent... This (blue-shifted wrt to our solar system) is our "local group" and a few thousand other galaxies in the Virgo supercluster. No galaxy, according to the experts, which is red-shifted, which is "supposedly" over 99% of the universe, is moving towards the great attractor. All those other superclusters have their own attractors. But all those red-shifted galaxies are MUCH more distant and we can state with some certainty that they are not really in our 3-space. We (Earth) are arguable only 'connected' in 3-space to every object in the universe whose light is blue-shifted. Outside of that, all bets are really off. That blue-shifted 3-space would consist of not only what is known as our "local group" of galaxies but everything in a roughly oval oblong pod, AKA the Virgo supercluster, which is blue shifted and also attracted to the aforementioned "Great Attractor," located in the night sky at about Sagittarius, 14 degrees and two minutes. For those who don't have a generalized picture of this four-layered model consider this hierarchy. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are the dominant structures in a cluster called the Local Group which is, in turn, an outlying member of the Virgo supercluster which is "supposedly" one of about 10,000 other superclusters which make up the universe. That is, if you buy into the most accepted cosmological model which has emerged in the last 5-6 years. Andromeda itself is almost a mirror image of the Milky Way about 2.2 million light-years away - and is speeding toward us at 200,000 miles per hour (unless its light also is being somehow "reflected"... and we are really looking at ourselves... ;-) But on top of that, our entire Local Group is hurtling toward the center of the Virgo cluster at one million miles per hour. If that was "all there is" then the universe would be closed. It is quite possible, of course, that everything which is not blue-shifted is in reality a "mirror image" of objects which are in our supercluster, and that the Universe is actually much smaller and younger than we have imagined. Jones
