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?

  • spauldo@lemmy.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • aCosmicWave@lemm.ee
      ·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.