Great Attractor

[1] However, it is obscured by the Milky Way's galactic plane, lying behind the Zone of Avoidance (ZOA), so that in visible light wavelengths, the Great Attractor is difficult to observe directly.

[citation needed] Then, the discovery of cosmic microwave background (CMB) dipoles was used to reflect the motion of the Local Group of galaxies towards the Great Attractor.

Intense efforts to work through the difficulties caused by the occlusion by the Milky Way during the late 1990s identified the Norma Cluster at the center of the Great Attractor region.

The location of the Great Attractor was finally determined in 1986: It is situated at a distance of somewhere between 150 and 250 Mly (million light-years) (47–79 Mpc), the larger being the most recent estimate, away from the Milky Way, in the direction of the constellations Triangulum Australe (The Southern Triangle) and Norma (The Carpenter's Square).

[9] In 2005, astronomers conducting an X-ray survey of part of the sky known as the Clusters in the Zone of Avoidance (CIZA) project reported that the Great Attractor was actually only one tenth the mass that scientists had originally estimated.

The local flows of the Laniakea supercluster converge in the region of the Norma and Centaurus Clusters, approximately at the position of the Great Attractor.