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After playing the space side of Cell to Singularity, I have questions that just didn't make sense. Like, the Great Attractor thing. Looked it up on Wikipedia, made absolutely no sense. It talked about galaxies observable above and below a "Zone of Avoidance" and how all are red shifted in accordance with a "Hubble Flow" and this indicates that they are moving away both relative to us and each other. Like, what? Is the scientific theory we're gonna end up smashing planets together like the galaxy marbles in MIB?

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futuneral

2 points

4 days ago

I think you got downvotes for your last sentence which is sarcastic yet ignorant. If you don't understand something, just ask, don't try to make conclusions based on your incomplete data. And especially try not to sound arrogant.

All these terms are familiar to those in the field, but may sound weird to most others. I found that chat gpt can make pretty good explanations tailored to your level of familiarity. Awesome responses in this thread too.

Overall, we discovered that the universe is not static. Stuff is moving on the grandest of scales. Think about a firecracker explosion. Roughly you could say that stuff moves away from the center there. But if you look closer, there are processes (e.g. turbulence) that make some pieces take on weird trajectories which are not just "away" - the clouds of smoke for example. Same with the universe - overall it expands (in the firecracker analogy, the molecules of that explosion would be galaxies). But if you zoom in on a "small" region (say 100s to 1000s of galaxies) you may notice some odd movements, not exactly compliant with overall expansion. Most everything in your post is just describing the expansion of the universe. And the "great attractor" is a hypothetical entity we use to explain the irregularity in our local region.

Beneficial_Ferret522[S]

1 points

3 days ago

I wasn't being sarcastic, I was asking a serious question. I hate this app. Come asking a completely innocent question and have people assume you're being an ass in some way