Cosmography of Our Cosmic Neighborhood
At the centre of the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster, a gravitational anomaly called the Great Attractor affects the motion of galaxies over a region hundreds of millions of light-years across. These galaxies are all redshifted, in accordance with Hubble's law. This indicates that they are receding from us and from each other, but the variations in their redshift are sufficient to reveal the existence of a concentration of mass equivalent to tens of thousands of galaxies.
The Great Attractor, discovered in 1986, lies at a distance of between 150 million and 250 million light-years (250 million is the most recent estimate), in the direction of the Hydra and Centaurus constellations. In its vicinity there is a preponderance of large old galaxies, many of which are colliding with their neighbours, and/or radiating large amounts of radio waves.
In 1987 Astronomer R. Brent Tully of the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Astronomy identified what he called the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, a structure one billion light years long and 150 million light years across in which, he claimed, the Local Supercluster was embedded.
Read more about this topic: Cosmic Web, Large-scale Structure
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