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.
Now I’m even more confused 😄
The explanation was probably fine, I just can’t wrap my head around it
The big bang wasn’t inside the universe to push anything. The big bang was the universe.
Think of it like leaves on a puddle. As water(space/dark energy) flows into the puddle. It expands. The leaves don’t. They just spread out over the surface of the puddle unless they are bound together with other leaves via surface tension(gravity).
I saw a really good demonstration of this once, but I can’t seem to find a video of it.
Basically imagine a rubber tube with 4 balls equal distance apart from each other.
–0–0–0–0–
If you stretch the tube from both ends all of the balls move an equal distance apart.
----0----0----0----0----
There is no one ball that is the center or the starting point. However if you focus on one ball while stretching it will seem like the others are moving away from it. But in reality they are all moving away from each other at the same rate.
That’s a excellent picture
And as far as we know, the tube is a loop or infinite, so it doesn’t even have a center itself.
Here’s another way to think about the location of the big bang.
If we look at the night sky, between the planets and stars, into the darkness we find there’s a faint glow emanating from everywhere. This is the cosmic microwave background, the oldest electromagnetic radiation that has taken the longest possible time to reach us because by this construction you avoided all the other objects in the way. This extends your view of the past to its maximum value: the age of the universe, which is literally all of the available time for photons to travel. Note that this is a simplification because it makes some assumptions about the transparency of the early universe, but it suits us fine.
It’s coming from everywhere because all of those places were there at the big bang. Where was the big bang? It was over there. And also in the opposite direction, there. Because all of those places were here.
Like, popping into existence all at once? Like a 3 dimensional blanket just popping in already moving as it is?
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.
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.
Think of a balloon. Squish the deflated balloon as where everything was. All of it started at a similar point but then the balloon started expanding and everything is moving away at an accelerated pace from each other
The balloon analogy can lead one astray. Our minds see the middle of the balloon inside and think “Big Bang was there”. But the analogy is only for the surface, and the Big Bang included all the surface, and nothing else.
I usually explain it as two dimensional creatures living on the surface of a sphere. To them there is no edge and you can go in a straight line forever. But if you inflate the sphere everything gets further apart from everything else. There’s no direction anything is moving in.
Makes more sense in my head than the balloon analogy at least
I like this one :)
When you look far away, you’re looking backwards in time. If you look really far away, you look really far back in time. If you look far enough away, you’ll see the big bang.
If you move a thousand light years to your left and do this again, you still see the big bang. Even though your “center” has changed. The big bang is more like a singularity in time than it is in space
We found Bill Nye’s Lemmy account!
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Well, if the sphere was there all along, yes, it’s possible. Very unlikely, but possible. If the whole universe is moving somewhere, we have no way to detect it. Note that this doesn’t exclude the Big Bang, that still happened even in your scenario.
It’s just one of those unprovable things - like whether there’s a God or whether we live in a Matrix. Unprovable and thus irrelevant.
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.
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.
No, the big bang happened everywhere, not just in a single point. The PBS documentaries will tell you as much.