The Great Attractor is a diffuse concentration
of matter some 400 million light-years in size located around 250
million light-years away within the so-called "Centaurus
Wall" of galaxies
, about seven degrees off the plane of the Milky Way. X-ray observations with the ROSAT satellite then revealed that Abell
3627 is at the center of the Great Attractor. It lies in the
so-called Zone of Avoidance, where the dust and stars of the Milky
Way's disk obscures as much as a quarter of the Earth's visible sky.