Something Is Pulling Our Galaxy. We Cannot See It.
About this video
Strip away the Earth's spin, its orbit, the Sun's circuit of the galaxy and the galaxy's drift inside its own neighbourhood, and a leftover motion remains: the Milky Way and everything bound to it are moving at roughly 600 kilometres per second, all in the same direction. We know the speed from the cosmic microwave background — move through that ancient light and the side you are heading toward reads very slightly hotter. The bearing points into Centaurus and Hydra, straight through the plane of our own galaxy, where dust and foreground stars hide close to a fifth of the sky. Astronomers call it the Zone of Avoidance, and the answer sits inside it. Radio and infrared surveys found the Norma cluster on that bearing, but its mass cannot account for the motion. The Shapley concentration further out contributes more. The 2014 Laniakea work redefined our supercluster as a watershed of flow lines 520 million light years across, and in 2017 the Dipole Repeller showed an underdense region behind us pushing about as hard as anything ahead is pulling. Which means the name was wrong from the start. There is no single object waiting at the end of the line — there is a landscape, and we are rolling downhill across it. Chapters 00:00 Moving at 600 km/s 01:20 The oldest light as a speedometer 03:00 The blind stripe across the sky 04:10 Norma, and the mass that does not add up 05:40 Laniakea 07:00 The push from behind Educational content. Where the measurements disagree, we say so.
From the video
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