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A huge volume of space that includes the Milky Way and super-clusters of galaxies is flowing towards a mysterious, gigantic unseen mass named mass astronomers have dubbed "The Great Attractor," some 250 million light years from our Solar System.

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.

Astronomers generally believe that the giant bar, which is too faint to be seen in this image, funnels the gas to the inner ring, where massive stars are formed within numerous star clusters.

massive gravity distorts the galaxies' shape and sends them ripping through the cluster at unimaginable speeds.

The Virgo Cluster is the nearest big collection of galaxies to Earth, and it's filled with a collection of gas called the intercluster medium, whose pressure drives the galaxies' own internal gas out into the cluster, roiling up the galaxies' dust.