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?
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.