Asklemmy

43885 readers

1940 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!

Open-ended question
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.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

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

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

126

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

51 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

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

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.