this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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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.
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.