Per Big Think, the Great Attractor is believed to be at the very heart of the Laniakea supercluster, the group of galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs, along with some 100,000 other galaxies. That it’s there seems evident by observation and calculation. What it is, exactly, remains unclear.
Part of the reason we don’t know what the Great Attractor might be is that it’s in a region of space we can’t directly observe. Because of where Earth is positioned within the Milky Way, a band of dust within the galaxy obscures our view of the sky in that direction. It’s known as the Zone of Avoidance, and while infrared and X-ray technology have allowed astronomers to begin mapping that region of space, they haven’t created a complete picture yet.
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Prevailing ideas for what the Great Attractor might be include a gathering point of dark energy — strong enough to work against the regular tendency of dark energy to push cosmic objects away from one another at increasing speed as the universe expands. The Great Attractor might also be a great hunk of mass. Per Space, the Norma cluster, a great collection of gas and galaxies already pulled in by gravity, is in the region of the Great Attractor. And it’s better conceived of as an area in space rather than a specific object — one representing the gravitational focal point of nearby matter.
