The Great Attractor and the Shapley Concentration

Abstract

We develop a non-linear relativistic model of the Shapley Concentration (SC) and its environs, including the Great Attractor (GA) and the Local Group (LG). We take the Shapley Concentration as a major attractive centre, and we use the Lemaître–Tolman model. We constrain our model with present day observations, plus the requirement that it have a physically reasonable evolution from small perturbations at last scattering. We investigate possible mass and velocity distributions, and we find that the peculiar velocity maximum near the SC is ~800 km/s inwards, the density between GA and SC must be about ~0.9 times background, the mass of the GA is probably 4–6 × 1015 M⊙, the SC’s contribution to the LG motion is negligible, and the value of the cosmological constant is not significant on this scale.