Venus, Salacia, Sun. Is the Universe Expanding? A Letter from Brent Tully. Tantra Studio Meets Salacia: An Excellent Discussion of Masturbation in the Context of Sexual Healing and Relationships.
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Tantra Studio begins after the song break at about 2 hours and 20 minutes.
Tonight’s astrology-rich edition (three of the sections address the current astrology), I look at the Venus-Sun-Salacia alignment that happened Friday morning. Here is the article I reference, about Salacia, which links to an earlier article.
In the third segment I discuss my new hobby — studying physics, and read a letter from Prof. Brent Tully, who led the team that figured out The Great Attractor. If you are into this subject, you will want to read the a Sagittarius reading from a few years ago called Learning To Fly. This includes a video that explains just what the Great Attractor is, inasmuch as someone can know — but the audio below is better (though not visual). It contains a replay of my interview with Prof. Brent Tully, who led the team that discovered the Lanikea supercluster.
The GA is the galaxy cluster of which the Milky Way is part. This structure has a focal point in mid-Sagittarius.
My email to Brent Tully
Good day Brent,
We spoke on my Pacifica Radio program several years ago about the GA/Laniakea.
I have been watching physics courses on Amazon, including one on gravity with Schumacher. In all of these, Hubble’s Constant is mentioned as is the constantly expanding universe.
But nobody talks about the Great Attractor or the many similar features that exist. If that is so, how are the galaxies all moving apart from one another?
I keep trying to reconcile this.
If you have a moment, or some good references I can follow, I would be most grateful.
Thanks Brent and happy belated birthday.
efc
Brent Replies
Hi Eric,
The matter that you raise probably confuses a lot of people not closely connected with the problem. I need to be clear about what is going on.
There are two processes in competition. One that is well advertised is the overall expansion of the universe which came out of the Big Bang. The other is the gravitational interactions between masses. The first is global while the second is local. For examples in the extreme, we are held to the Earth, the Earth to the Sun, and the Sun to the Milky Way galaxy because on these local scales gravity easily wins over cosmic expansion. It is on scales of about 15-20 million light years where cosmic expansion starts to win over local gravity.
In our maps of the growth of structure in the universe, we plot things in co-moving coordinates. This is a coordinate system where cosmic expansion is cancelled out, leaving the residuals caused by local gravity to be evident. We do this because if we plotted in physical coordinates then cosmic expansion would be so dominant that the local effects would be obscured. Colleagues in the field understand what we do, but others may not, and perhaps we aren’t clear about this fundamental point.
So to your question, it is only very locally, like near the Virgo Cluster or other regions of great mass concentration that matter is trapped and facing back on the central concentration. On the 300 million lightyear scale of the Great Attractor, although in co-moving coordinates galaxies are falling together, in physical coordinates galaxies are flying apart. The motions caused by gravity are only perturbations on cosmic expansion. Still, these perturbations are interesting because they are telling us how much and where there are concentrations of matter.
Regards,
Brent
Brent Tully
Institute for Astronomy
2680 Woodlawn Drive
Honolulu, HI 96822