The straight dope on the Great Attractor?

Factual Questions
1

I was surfing wikipedia and came across “The Great Attractor”… to quote:
“The Great Attractor is a gravity anomaly in intergalactic space within the vicinity of the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster at the center of the Laniakea Supercluster that reveals the existence of a localized concentration of mass tens of thousands of times more massive than the Milky Way.”

But then the page later implies that the Great Attractor may be only a 10th of the estimated mass (which would still be thousands of times more than the milky way).

Whats the straight dope on this? Whats the current astronomical thought? Do we have any idea what it is? The mother of all super colossal giant black holes? How can something have a mass thousands of times more than our galaxy and we don’t know what it is?

2

Dark matter, maybe? :dubious: :confused:

3

Probably an end-of-level boss.

I’ve just started to play Super Mario Galaxy 2 on the Wii U (download for £8.99…a bloody bargain)
and Bowser appears to be getting bigger game-by-game and this is obviously an incarnation for an as yet unreleased SMG3

4

Well, that area of space is located in the Zone of Avoidance, so it’s harder to see what’s there, and there could be an even larger supercluster beyond it. As for what it is, it’s a supercluster of galaxies. I don’t think that part is a mystery, is it?

5

The Great Attractor? Now you have me blushing! Not denying it, but blushing.

IOW, a bump because I’m curious, too.

6

Well the wikipage never says that, thats what I’m asking, is that the current thinking of Astronomical knowledge or we really just don’t know?

7

It seems there is some speculation that the Great Attractor is the Shapley Supercluster, but others say the observed mass of that cluster is not enough to account for the strength of the gravitational attraction we see. This webpage implies its still quite a mystery:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/06/the-great-attractor-is-something-is-pulling-our-region-of-the-universe-towards-a-colossal-unseen-mas.html