this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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What if there's a bigger, still unknown reference point? (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by ViscloReader@lemmy.world to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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When we think about teleportation, there's always someone talking about how you should take into account the earth and the sun moving through space. Let's step back a little (not so much) what if the galaxy we're currently in is rotating really really fast around another, bigger, still unknown, spacial object?

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[–] gmtom@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Well the thing is the universe is so big that anything further than 14ish billion lightyears away from us basically doesn't exist as any information from them woukd take longer to get to us thsn the universe has existed and due to cosmoc expansion, that linfkrmstion actuslly gets firther away from us over time, despite it traveling at the speed of light. And since the universe rotaing around a point would require a gravitstional onteraction that travels at the speed of light, we physically cannot be rotating around a point further away than that.

And since the same is true for any point in space, there can't really be any centre to the universe.

The closest we could come to that is a point in the relative centre of the Virgo supercluster, which is the largest structure in "our" universe that are gravitational bound to us and won't dissappear from our sight as the universe expands.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago

Yeah but since the speed of light is always relative to a reference frame, wouldn’t the distance to the beginning of the universe depend on the frame you use to measure it?