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Researchers find unseen force pushing the Milky Way across the universe

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A large unseen force is pushing the Milky Way across the universe, according to a new research study.

As CNN reports, the newly discovered Dipole Repeller explains the why behind what researchers have known for the past three decades – that the galaxy is moving at a relative speed.

Everything is moving. The earth is rotating on its axis and orbiting the sun, which along with the rest of the solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way, which along with other galaxies in the Laniakea Supercluster, is racing through space at about 2 million kilometers per hour.

Researchers have long believed that the Milky Way was attracted to an area rich with dozens of clusters of galaxies 750 million light-years away, called the Shapley Concentration or Shapley Attractor.

Brent Tully, one of the study authors and an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, said that galaxies, due to the expansion of the universe, are flying apart from one another, and at the same time, being tugged by gravity from neighbors that cause their motions to deviate “toward regions of high density and away from regions of low density.”

As the Milky Way participates in that flow, Tully said, the galaxy goes “along for the ride.”

The researchers created a 3-D map of galaxy flow, with the aid of powerful telescopes, the researchers found the Dipole Repeller, which he explains is a pattern similar to streams of water organized by gravity to run downhill.

“In detail, we played a mathematical trick by inverting the sense of gravity to see where flows would terminate in this altered case. Flows ended at our Dipole Repeller,” Tully said.

The researchers now believe that the Milky Way isn’t just being pulled by the Shapley Attractor, but that it is actually receiving an equal push from a cosmic void behind the Milky Way.

Little is known about the Dipole Repeller or the galaxies within it, but understanding more about it can increase our understanding of the universe and how it works.