Is it at all possible that instead of being pushed away, we are instead getting pulled toward something huuuuuge via gravity? As if we are falling into something way greater than ourselves? I thought this was a wild idea but after I Googled it I found out that there is such a thing as a “Great Attractor”. Something 150 million light-years away is literally pulling all nearby galaxies towards it but no one knows exactly what it is.
So how do we know there aren’t any other Great Attractors, Greater Attractors, ad infinitum?
I think you need to let go of this idea that the big bang happened at a specific location or that we are moving away from or towards a point in space. There is no specific point from which all points in space are departing. Instead, every point in space is moving away from every other.
Consider the following!
Point at any object. That object is at some distance away from you in space which is also a distance away from you in time. For example, an object one light year away is one year into the past, as perceived by you.
Now, point in any direction. No matter where you point, if you extend the line forever, it intersects with the big bang. There is no place to which you can point, no direction, no infinite line you can draw that doesn't include the big bang.
Everything not gravitationally bound is moving away from everything else. Every single point in space is growing larger. That means that things farther away from you are moving away from you faster then things closer to you. That's true no matter where in the universe you are.
There's not really an "away" from the big bang. That's something science communicators fail to explain - the big bang happened everywhere. Space may have been infinite in size (we don't know) and it still happened everywhere.
I'd recommend looking up the YouTube channel for FermiLab. They've got some excellent videos on the subject.
Thank you so much for the explanation!
I’m going to sound like a total idiot but if our universe was at the center of a ginormous sphere could that give an illusion that every point in space was moving away from another when in fact we could all be falling (getting pulled by gravity) toward whatever edge of the sphere we are closest to?
Not unless we were directly in the center of it, in which case everything would seem to move away from us. But even then, if I'm not mistaken, physicists and astronomers have also proven that other objects are also moving away from one another too.
We can tell how something is moving based on the shift of its light, like the Doppler effect. The further something is the more its light is shifted, which was how we came to know this phenomenon in general of increasing size of space between all things.
other objects are also moving away from one another too
What if everything is just getting smaller and smaller, so it just appears that everything is getting further away from everything else? Eventually, everything will be really tiny, but we won't notice, because everything else will be the same smol also.
Lol if joking. If not, I'm sorry but you severely misunderstood what is happening here
Totally just joking. But I like to play with ideas, even absurd ones. So partly not joking also?
When I talk about my Big Bang Theory fan page it propels women away.
Others have mentioned, everything is moving away from each other, like the surface of an expanding balloon. But that is what we observe, and there is more beyond the observable universe.
There is an idea that our universe might actually be in a black hole in a higher universe. To expand on the balloon simile (pun intended), this would be like a balloon expanding uniformly except in a spot, a bubble appears and expands faster. A bubble within a bubble. Kind of a tumor, an outgrowth universe. Hope I've been illustrative enough.
It's not exactly what you asked, but a higher level black hole is kind of something pulling all matter in our universe instead of pushing.
The structures of our observable universe are larger than you might think.
If you're truly interested in jumping into the rabbit's black hole.
