Moving whilst standing still

[andreas]

Did you know that 250 million lightyears away from us starts the giant phenomenon called "The Great Attractor". The Great Atractor spands for 400 million lightyears and contains hundredthousends of galaxys.
Our own Milkyway contains about 200 million stars so you can imagine the number of stars existing in The Great Attractor.
The Galaxys lie so close to eachother that The Great Attractors collosal mass has a gravity of astronomical proportions, hence the word "The Great Attractor".

The Gravity is so imense that our own galaxy, The Milkyway, among the other galaxys in the solar system are sucked straight towards it.

We are sucked towards it at the speed of 600 km/s.

Imagine that. We're all moving at this imense speed, all the time, but we cannot even notice it.
That is what I call "moving while standing still".

That's awsome, in my mind...

 

[Lex]

Aside from the affect of 'the great attractor' [I had never heard of that before] the universe has been expanding since the big bang, everything is constantly moving away from what is thought to be a central point at an ever increasing speed.

So even without that, the universe is continually expanding, with the spaces between everything in space getting bigger all the time...which we obviously don't notice either. Sort of puts our planet into perspective really.

 

[StressWon]

Thats cool as hell man,,,I love that shit

 

[andreas]

Yeah I've thought about that fact also. I cannot xplain that. I just read about the great attractor in this weeks issue of "vetenskap". A swedish scientific journal.

So that about the universe expanding at the same time as the atractor sucking it in is beyone me. I cannot grasp how it can do both but perhaps it can.

Nice insight though

 

[Lex]

Well, the effect of ''the great attractor'' must weaker than the force which is making the universe expanding - which means the net result is that the universe is constantly expanding, even though certain things are being attracted that certain area of the universe. [which is probably extremely small anyway, compared to the overall size of the universe].

 

[andreas]

That must be the fact.. And it only sayd that galaxys are sucked towards it. So perhaps a thing of a galatic mass only gets affected and the univers expands.
But still, the univers is more than stars and planets. It's void aswell. And that mau be expanding still.

But you have to agree with me that it's a really cool fact that daunts the mind. Mine anyways

 

[Lex]

Well as far as I can understand, the effect of ''the great attractor'' must be very minimal in relation the the force which has been making the universe expand since the big bang.

This is a really shit analogy but it might help make the principal a little easier to understand. Say a train is moving from A to B at a high speed, and there is a small force acting in the opposite direction [I dunno, a car tied to it trying to drive in the opposite direction...]. The force exterted by the car is a lot smaller than the force pushign the train forward, so the car will not affect the direction of the train - it will continue to move forward [in reality it would probably decrease in speed a little].

Well that principle would aply to the universe, except it is a lot more complex - the universe is expanding constant in all directions at an ever increasing speed. And remember that the universe is unimaginaly huge - the effect of ''the great attractor'' would have no overall affect on the expansion of the universe. However large the force ''the great attractor'' exerts, the force that keeps the universe expanding will always be greater: ''the great attractor'' itself is moving away from the centre of the universe.

 

[andreas]

Yeah, that shit can be thought about all day and will always leave more questions then anwers.

Here's some other shit for you to think about.

As we all know the speed of light is the fastest thing there are, 299 792 458 m/s.
But contemplate this. this is a fact:

If you stand still and a beam of light is moving away from you it will speed away from you at the above mentioned speed.
But if you yourself move after the lightbeam at, lets say, half the speed of light the light will still speed away from you at 299 792 458 m/s.
As stated by Einstein for a bout 100 years ago the property of light being measured is independent to the way the person measuring the light is moving.
This has all to do with the relativity theory.

That shit is wierd

 

[Lex]

That is pretty hard to get your head round.

Whats harder to get your head around is some quantum physics stuff. Whereby it is widely accepted that one object can be in two places at one - Einstein's thoery of relativity and quantum physics are sort of mutually exclusive if you get me [i.e. if one is correct the other must be incorrect, or they could both turn out to be wrong obviously]

You should read Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History Of Time'. [It's not a timeline, lol] One of my friends was reading it and I was like 'Don't you need a PhD in physics to understand that??' but I ended up reading it and it is pretty accesible - you just have to be willing to imagine some of the stuff it talks about. I have to say at times though, I just had to put the book down and really think about what the paragraph I had just said really meant and what it entailed. It gets a lot more complex as it goes on, but I sort of wanted to keep reading to try and understand what the next bit was about...

........ it goes onto loads of different things about how the universe works and about how subatomic particles [the smallest things in existance, which are actually made up of even smaller 'things'] make the whole universe behave in the way it does.

Try it, its a right mindfuck.

 

[andreas]

Nice man. Perhaps I should read that, though I doubt I'll understand much
It's like the stringtheory.... "sorry sir, could you explain that again please..."

take a look at this. A new one is posted each day. You might find this interesting

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

 

[Lex]

LOL, I doubt you'd find it hard to understand, presuming you read the swedish edition anyway. It starts of okay anyway...its later on that the complexity of some of the stuff that makes you have to think for a while.

...I looked at a couple of those images/explanations on that site too. Its incredible how telescopes let people see that sort of stuff.

 

[Rhythmikal]

your moving while your stood still on the train lol.

but about the expanding universe thing, i heard that eventually it will stop expanding and start to suck back in, and thats when we're all fucked.

the wierdest thing is if the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?

 

[changalang]

Thats cool as hell man,,,I love that shit

haha u talking about the galaxy or when ur high cuz i love that shit too