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Do cosmologists know for sure that the Big Bang is propelling all matter away? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by aCosmicWave@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] PotjiePig@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Try this:

So everything in space, every object had to get to where it is via time. It travelled there. Everything can't be anywhere without time as without time it wouldn't have been able to move there. Time is a constant graph, and as it moves forward, things move around and as such, space is able to exist. This is why we consider space and time to be linked.

Now consider this: if one was to plot a graph of space and time on an x y axis to track an object, there is a point on the graph where time has to be zero, and as such space has to be zero.

This is the big bang.

It is the beginning of the graph. When time was zero, and as such so was space.

Space did not burst out from a single point that we could find out there in space, as there was no point. everything was still everywhere much like it is now, except everywhere just so happened to be so close to one another to be at the same point on the graph. When time began, it just about instantly expanded out, everywhere in every direction. There is no 'center' to this expansion, just like if you blow up a balloon there is no center on the surface of the balloon, it just expands everywhere, and more importantly with time we are able to quantify this.

[–] OceanSoap@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think this is hard to visualize with words like "out" being used, because then there must be an "in", and if you draw everything back "in" you get a Centerpoint, no matter what.

Same with the baloon, because when plated, its going in all directions except for "in", and in space, objects are zooming past each other, "in" and "out" yet still as expansion movement. (Right? I only kind of understand what you're explaining while guessing at why it's not 100% understandable for me.

In fact, anything that expands with a surface is going to be hard to visualize as how space moves because it all has a point it starts from.

Literally no idea if I'm making sense here.