X-rays Reveal What Makes the Milky Way Move<br />With the galaxy cluster population mapped over the entire sky for the first time, Kocevski analyzed how all the clusters surrounding the Milky Way would affect it and found that only 44% of our galaxy's motion through space is due to the gravitational pull of galaxies in the nearby Great Attractor region. The remaining portion is the result of a large-scale flow in which much of the local Universe, including perhaps the Great Attractor itself, is being pulled toward the Shapley Supercluster.<br /><br />The results confirm previous work, which suggested the Milky Way's motion was influenced by structures more distant than the Great Attractor, but this study is the first to reach this conclusion after having fully mapped the Great Attractor and regions behind it.<br /><br />
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0510106<br />We aim to settle the debate regarding the fraction of the Local Group's peculiar velocity that is induced by structures beyond the Great Attractor by calculating the dipole anisotropy of the largest, all-sky, truly X-ray selected cluster sample compiled to date. The sample is the combination of the REFLEX catalog in the southern hemisphere, the eBCS sample in the north, and the CIZA survey in the Galactic plane. The composite REFLEX+eBCS+CIZA sample overcomes many of the problems inherent to previous galaxy and cluster catalogs which limited their effectiveness in determining the origin of the Local Group's motion. From the dipole anisotropy present in the cluster distribution we determine that 44% of the Local Group's peculiar velocity is due to infall into the GA region, while 56% is in the form of a large-scale flow induced by more distant overdensities between 130 and 180 h^-1 Mpc away. In agreement with previous analyses, we find that the Shapley superclust