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?
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?
Kind of a tangent at this point, but there is a very good reason that that couldn’t be the case: according to the shell theorem , nowhere in the interior of a spherical shell of matter experiences any net gravitational force – wherever you are inside the sphere, the forces counteract exactly.
Otherwise, though, the metric expansion of space is different from typical movement, and it isn’t correct to say that things or being pushed or pulled. Rather, the distance between every pair of points in the universe increases over time, with that rate of increase proportional to the points’ distance. Importantly, for very distant points, the distance can increse faster than the speed of light, which would be disallowed by any model which describes the expansion in terms of objects moving in a traditional sense.
You are right that things would still look like we’re accelerating away from us, even if we were actually contracting.
Interesting hypothesis! How do we investigate?
What could we expect from a large central gravitational point? We should have other signs of the gravity well:
We would expect a point that we contract towards (and that seems ill fitting, as we see the expansion moves as the observer (including earth) moves), we would expect some kind of mass or similar effect, which would also have a size to fit it in (we know that gravity works different when you’re inside the mass, and we would be able to see it, much like black holes or dark matter), we would expect things to orbit the gravity well (which we know that at least our galaxy doesn’t orbit us).
You might want to actually check on these things to make sure they apply and are true, but at least at first glance it seems the expansion is better explained without a central gravity.
The Universe probably wouldn’t fit in a sphere of any size and it very well may be infinite.
But looking at a very large spherical region like the visible universe from our perspective here on Earth, everything is moving away from us. If objects were being pulled towards one particular edge of our imaginary sphere, it would look very different. We’d see a clear drift in that direction, but it all looks pretty even across every direction we look.
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.
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Lol if joking. If not, I’m sorry but you severely misunderstood what is happening here
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If that was the case, things wouldn’t move away from us at the same rate. Things on our side of the center would move away from us slower than things on the other side of the center. Observation doesn’t support that.