Earth Is Hurtling Towards Something Strange and We Don't Know What It Is

hey 42 here in the 1970s astronomer studying the leftover light from the birth of the universe known as The Cosmic microwave background discovered something remarkable our galaxy and everything in it including you is hurtling through the universe at an astonishing 390 m per second that number is almost impossible to put into perspective so let me just say this since you started watching this video you have physically traveled more than 11,000 miles and you thought you were a couch potato accurately measuring the speed of our galaxy for the first time was a big deal but it

was also a little bit scary because nobody really knew exactly why the Milky Way was moving quite so quickly a big chunk of our velocity could be explained by the expansion of the universe which causes all astronomical objects to move at a rates described by something called the Hubble flow and some of the rest was accounted for by the interplay of gravity between the Milky Way and our nearest Galactic neighbors like Andromeda but something was still missing we appeared to be moving at a speed and in a direction that we just couldn't quite explain it

was almost as though our entire galaxy was being dragged off course by some vast distant object that was disconcerting to say the least but there was more because it turned out it wasn't just a Milky Way that was being pulled towards this mysterious unseen object it was everything every single Galaxy in our little corner of the universe around 100,000 of them in a region spanning more than 500 million light years is being pulled inexorably towards the same unknown thing no longer just disconcerting that was downright terrif Ying using powers of creativity that we can still

only Marvel at even today astronomers decided to call the mysterious object the greater tractor but coming up with such an ingenious name was the easy part the hard part was determining just what the hell it could possibly be there's only one force in the universe capable of nudging entire galaxies off course over distances of hundreds of Millions of light here is love sorry I've been listening to a lot of music lately what I meant to say is gravity gravity is created by mass The more mass an object has the stronger the gravitational force it exerts

in order to attract a 100,000 galaxies over a distance of hundreds of millions of light years the great attractor has to be big and when I say big what I really mean is unimaginably mind-bogglingly rules of the the universe breakingly colossal the question is what is it and more importantly what's going to happen to us when it finally reels Us in let's start with the first question we typically learn about distant objects in Space by training our telescopes on them and having a good look around but just to amp up the mystery even more when

astronomers first tried to probe the great ATT tractor with their trusty telescopes they quickly realized that wasn't going to work this time the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy about 100,000 light years across and its 100 billion or so stars are concentrated along a plane 1,000 light years thick unfortunately whoever built this place seems to have left a lot of crap lying around because when we try to peer into deep space through the plane of our own Galaxy our view is almost entirely obscured by vast clouds of Interstellar dust and gas this section of the

night sky that's uded by the plane of the Milky Way is known as the zone of avoidance and it obscures our view of about 10% of the universe and you guessed it the great attractor just so happens to lie smack bang in the middle of it that's why for several decades after the great attractor was first discovered its true nature remained a total mystery to us we could only study it in direct ly by measuring its gravitational impact on the galaxies around it it wasn't much to go on but it did allow us to determine

the greater tractor approximate location between 150 and 250 million light years away in the direction of the Norma constellation and for the first time we got a hint at its massive size according to our current best estimates the greater tractor contains Mass equivalent to 10 quadrillion Suns at the time that number just didn't make any sense nothing in our universe is even close to being that size as of today the biggest single entity ever discovered is an ultra massive black hole called ton 618 and it's so absurdly enormous that part of me suspects those pesky

astronomers might have just made it up for a laugh this biomorphic black hole is almost 250 billion miles across and it Powers a quazar that burns with the light of 140 trillion Suns it may well be the biggest thing that has ever or will ever exist in our universe it is an or inspiring terrifying nightmare of Oblivion incarnate and yet it's estimated to weigh in it just 66 billion solar masses not too shabby as far as black holes go but still around 150,000 times less massive than the monstrosity that is the great attractor incidentally scientists

May recently have discovered an even bigger Ultra massive black hole Phoenix a with around 100 billion solar masses but they're still some debate about its true size anyway whichever is larger the question remains if the biggest thing in the known universe is nowhere near massive enough to explain the gravitational effect of the greater tractor then what the hell can this is usually the part of the video where I tell you that for the time being we have no idea except this time we have actually do as I've already mentioned it's almost impossible to directly study

the greater tractor using regular telescopes that is to say telescopes that gather light predominantly from the visible part of the spectrum but visible wav LMS aren't the only ones available to us and in the 40 or so years since the greater tractor was first discovered we've made huge leaps forward with both radio and infrared telescopes with the help of these new technologies we've finally been able to peer through the zone of avoidance to catch a few fleeting glimpses of the patch of sky that contains the mysterious and enormous great attractor for the very first time

so what did we find there the universe's most morbidly obese black hole an Intergalactic Mega structure built by an advanced alien race Kanye West's ego sadly not what we actually found was more galaxies like loads of them okay so that might sound like a bit of an anticlimax but seeing what lay beyond the zone of avoidance finally helped us to understand the true nature of the great attractor and it wasn't all that we'd been expecting but in order to explain what it was we're going to have to go on a quick Journey right back to

the beginning of time it's easy to think of the universe as entirely random a swirling mass of 200 trillion galaxies just dotted around all over the place but that isn't actually the case in fact the universe has a clearly defined large scale structure that we call the cosmic web scientists still aren't completely sure why this structure exists but the most common theory is that the very early Universe wasn't entirely uniform there were tiny fluctuations in the distribution of matter the denser regions had more mass and therefore more gravitational potential so they began to attract even

more matter over billions of years the mass Rich regions of the universe got richer and the mass poor regions got poorer it was basically Intergalactic capitalism and through this process slowly but surely gravity shaped the universe we see today pulling together Grand structures and leaving behind nearly endless voids the structures we see today follow a clear hierarchy I'm simplifying a little but broadly speaking stars form galaxies galaxies form Galaxy groups and clusters and Galaxy groups and clusters band together to form super clusters in our little corner of the universe the hierarchy looks something like this

arstar is part of the Milky Way the Milky Way is one of about 40 galaxies in what we call the local group and the local group is one of about 100 Galaxy groups and clusters that form the gargantuan Virgo supercluster for a long time we thought the Virgo supercluster represented the totality of our cosmological neighborhood but we were wrong because when we were finally able to Glimpse what lay beyond the zone of avoidance we realized that the Virgo supercluster which contains about 45,000 individual galaxies was just one branch of a much larger structure the lania

super cluster at this point we're so far outside the kind of scale the human brain can comprehend that the numbers become completely meaningless but for the record the lanaka supercluster is about 520 million light years across and it's home to around 100,000 galaxies basically it's really bloody big but here's the most important part the mysterious greater tractor can be found smack bang in the middle love it actually that isn't entirely true the greater tractor isn't exactly in the lania super cluster it is the lanaka supercluster that's what we learned when we first saw beyond the

zone of avoidance the greater tractor isn't a thing it's a place we're often told to think of SpaceTime as being a bit like a trampoline there's plenty of criticism about that analogy buses will work for our purposes here stick a heavy weight somewhere on the trampoline and the surface will be deformed representing the curvature of SpaceTime the more massive the object the deeper the deformation and the stronger the gravity the greater tractor is simply the deepest point on the trampoline in our corner of the universe the gravitational Locus sit at the heart of a vast

Cosmic structure that all surrounding galaxies are Falling Towards okay so we're fairly sure we figured out what the greater tractor is but how about the second part of the question I posed at the start of this video what's going to happen to us when we get there well here's where things get a bit confusing more confusing the greater tractor is located between 150 and 250 million light years away but for the sake of Simplicity let's just call it 200 traveling towards it at our current velocity of 390 MS by my calculations we should expect to

arrive there in about 95 billion years except we won't in fact we will never reach the great ATT tractor you see the universe is expanding and the rate of that expansion is increasing we may be hurtling towards the center of the lanaka supercluster at break neck speed but thanks to the accelerating expansion of SpaceTime the distance we are from the the greater tractor will eventually begin to grow even as our speed towards it increases that's kind of confusing so let me give you another analogy imagine two ants crawling towards each other on the surface of

a balloon if the balloon stays at a fixed volume eventually the ant will meet and do a high five or something but if you start inflating that balloon the distance between the ants will increase blow the balloon up fast enough and no matter how quickly those ants Scurry towards one another they will continue to get further apart that's essentially what will happen with the Milky Way and the lanoca supercluster so sadly our distance descendants will never get to high five the great ATT tractor for those of you who are into existential dread it's worth pointing

out that the expansion of the universe won't just take us away from the lanaka supercluster it'll completely cut us off from everything as as of today the observable universe is 93 billion light years across and it contains an estimated 200 trillion galaxies about 40 of those the ones in the local group are gravitationally bound to us we're with them for the Long Haul but thank to the expansion of the universe the rest will eventually begin to recede into the cold dark reaches of space at a rate faster than the speed of light at least relative

to us and since nothing in the universe can travel faster than light not only will no human ever explore those galaxies no matter how long our species survives or how advanced it becomes even the light from their Stars won't be fast enough to reach us and the grand Cosmic web of the universe we know today will fade away to nothing thanks for watching just a quick word to say that I couldn't make these videos without the support of my patreon members consider joining the exclusive 42 Discord Community by supporting me on patreon it's a great

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