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by gangorgasm 668 days ago
What is "Mpc"., if anybody knows?
2 comments

It is a distance unit, megaparsecs.

Or approximately 3.25 million light years.

Appreciated. Big distance

I have difficulty conceptualizing "distance over time ... over [huge] distance"

I guess it means "chunks about so [megaparsecs] large are moving [themselves] at a speed of so many Km. per second" but I could be wrong

The measurement for expansion is linear with distance, so two spots one Mpc from another moves away front each other at 67.4 km/s while two spots two Mpcs from each other moves at 134.8km/s. This means the expansion is accelerating and some parts of the now visible universe will eventually move away from us faster than the speed of light resulting in them disappearing from our view.

The distances, time and speeds are indeed very hard to comprehend from our usual references :)

It's crazy that some parts of the universe will actually for all purposes vanish

Thanks for taking time to break it all down

At some point there will only be the galaxies in our local group visible, it's interesting to imagine a future civilization only having such a limited universe to view.
Doesn't this mean that on a long enough time frame, an observer anywhere in the universe won't be able to see anything because everything else in the universe is too far away to be visible?
It means that a chunk of space with length 1 megaparsec will be 67.4 km longer a second later. If you divide that new length by the old length, you get the factor by which space expands each second. It’s a very small factor (i.e. very close to 1), but there are also many seconds.
megaparsec (1 million parsecs)
Thanks much