What is the Great Attractor, and will it destroy us?
The Great Attractor Understanding the Supercluster concept: To understand what's going on with the Great Attractor, we need to look at the bigger picture, and I mean the biggest picture of all. Beyond the Milky Way is our galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. A little over 2.5 million light-years away is the Triangulum Galaxy. These galaxies, along with a few dozen others form the Local Group, a gravitationally bound clump about 10 million light-years across. The next big thing down the way is the Virgo Cluster, which has more than 1,300 galaxies packed into a dense clump only 65 million light-years away. The Virgo Cluster is gravitationally bound too; this would mean its member galaxies tend to hang out near each other, tied up by their mutual gravity. Going bigger than that gets a little fuzzy, but there are enormous collections of galaxies called 'superclusters'. They got sweet names too, based on what constellation was looked through to map out the structure, or nam
