this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
121 points (92.9% liked)

Asklemmy

43863 readers
1633 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] CmdrShepard@lemmy.one -5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

From my layman's perspective after having watched probably every space documentary produced for channels like the Space channel and Discovery's conglomeration, the big bang happened and propelled matter out from the source but now, billions of years later, space is expanding not only from this source but also between everything that was propelled from this initial blast.

If you likened that to the USA, the big bang happened in central Iowa, but things aren't just expanding from the source in Iowa, cities like LA and San Fran are also expanding away from each other at an accellerated rate. AFAIK, the leading theory is that dark matter is causing the intra-galaxy expansion, but little is known about dark matter and what drives this expansion. This is why it is believed that the universe will die a cold death (where all solar energy burns out) rather than collapsing in on itself since everything is moving away from everything else. At a certain point of expansion, nothing will have a gravitational effect on anything else.

[–] Tatters@feddit.uk 7 points 1 year ago

It is dark energy, and not dark matter, that is believed to be causing the accelerating expansion of the universe. Dark matter has the opposite effect - gravitational attraction.

[–] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago

No, the big bang happened everywhere, not just in a single point. The PBS documentaries will tell you as much.