The Great Attractor

[Sonic#]

So, this was cool. One of the things I learned about today: there's this [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor]huge gravitational anomaly[/url] that's distorting the paths of many galactic clusters over a range of several hundred million light years. It even has a pull on us.

The Great Attractor was detected by noticing a deviation from the previously observed redshift of galaxies that are flying further away relative to us. They were flying away, of course, but they were doing so either faster or slower than we expected. Eventually, astronomers gathered enough data to extrapolate a focal point from which a gravitational disruption could produce the given effects. Many studies since have confirmed its existence and added to the wealth of data on how galaxies around it and similar areas are affected.

I find it so cool, maybe because it's so much larger than anything I've ever known, anything I could know in a lifetime. I can't precisely put it into words at midnight. (I can't at any other time.)

But the title of this thread is a pun. Many aspects of astronomy attract this very novice stargazer. I desire without knowing precisely why. I would defend the importance of its study to anyone who argued to me otherwise. The Great Attractor is my, well, great attractor. Do you have a great attractor in science? Is it this? Something else? How'd you learn about it?

[Eravial]

I was really into string theory in high school, which I learned about at a summer gifted program where I took an informal course on physics. We started out the week doing simple momentum transfer experiments, but when the professor (who was a total hippie and we bonded over Grateful Dead) saw that we were like "duh," we moved on to theoretical physics, and at the end of the week performed a Dr. Seuss version of the tale of Schrodinger's Cat.

Biology, and specifically evolution and ecology, are my geekout things nowadays, which is good since I'm majoring in it. I like social evolution and human evolution stuff, and yes, evolutionary psychology, though I look at the latter through a pretty critical lens. I'm also pretty fascinated by infectious diseases.

[rowan]

I worked with one of the guys who found the Great Attractor (back before I worked with him). Sadly he has Alzheimer's now.

Jeez, I don't know how I can pick just one... though stabbing a cow eye in high school biology class and squicking out my (male) lab mate certainly sticks out as an enjoyable experience early on. Come to think of it, I sort of tormented the poor guy.

Physics, biology, astronomy... all pretty awesome stuff.

[monk]

It all started with conductivity as a kid, and my hunger has just grown since then into almost all areas of science with a special focus on the non-biological ones.

touching the nodes of 9volt batteries to my tongue

making chains of paper clips as a kid and putting them on either end of batteries and having them heat up.

My friend old fashioned crank telephone that would shock the crap out of you if you held the two wires while it was cranked

in highschool turning on the static generator and making a human chain from where it sat to a sleeping students desk and zapping them on the ear while they napped.

Making a human chain of 8 people in a circle with each end of the circle touching the electrode of a 50,000 volt taser and all of us getting shocked.

and what facilitated my experiments with all this stuff? my local Radio Shack.