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by vickychijwani
3540 days ago
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No, I think flukus is right. The space itself between galaxies is expanding (and the expansion is accelerating), which means, so eventually even our closest neighbour Andromeda will disappear behind our observable horizon and be eternally inaccessible, in all regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's counter-intuitive, but a good way to visualize is by imagining miniature galaxies printed on an expanding balloon (with the expansion speeding up), and then imagining what happens to a photon leaving galaxy A and travelling "towards" galaxy B - you'll notice that if the balloon is expanding rapidly enough, the photon ends up moving away relative to both A and B. |
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Due to conformal flatness of the FLRW metric, it's possible to represent the Hubble flow as vertical lines, the spatial surfaces at constant cosmological time as horizontal lines and light rays as straight lines angled at 45°. The geodesics for massive particles not following the Hubble flow however would be more complicated, but are of no particular interest.
The big bang happens at the lower edge of the paper, the upper edge represents t=inf. The observable universe is bounded by two light rays that meet at infinity. In our toy model with 1 spatial dimension, if an observer follows the Hubble flow along a vertical line, the number of observable galaxies will be proportional to the width of the intersection of the cone formed by light rays and the horizontal line representing space at the time when galaxies first formed.
As ASCII, it looks like this:
Galaxies that are visible right now will continue to be visible forever in theory, but may become undetectable in practice due to increasing redshift. They will also not be seen to cross any 'edge of the universe', but instead appear to become fainter, redder and frozen in time.As time goes by, we will continue to observe new galaxies being formed, which increases the total number of theoretically visible galaxies. In practice, redshift may again prevent us from doing so in practice.