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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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[–] xkforce@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

What I mean is that what we observe is best approximated as a relative lack of spatial curvature over long distance scales. One of the lines of evidence for this is the cosmic microwave background. A flat topology for space-time over long distances would look different than an open or closed universe: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-universe-flat-topology.html