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by mabbo 4125 days ago
> most of them are moving away so fast that the light from their death wouldn't ever reach us

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that's mistaken. Given enough time, even things moving away from us at the speed of light will eventually be seen by us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_on_a_rubber_rope

3 comments

> ...galaxies that are more than approximately 4.5 gigaparsecs away from us are expanding away from us faster than light. We can still see such objects because the Universe in the past was expanding more slowly than it is today, so the ancient light being received from these objects is still able to reach us, though if the expansion continues unabated, there will never come a time that we will see the light from such objects being produced today (on a so-called "space-like slice of spacetime") and vice versa because space itself is expanding between Earth and the source faster than any light can be exchanged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space

The rate of expansion of space-time is currently accelerating so the ant on a rubber rope analogy does not hold.

Edit: from the ant on a rubber rope article you linked

> However, the metric expansion of space is accelerating. An ant on a rubber rope whose expansion increases with time is not guaranteed to reach the endpoint.[3] The light from sufficiently distant galaxies may still therefore never reach Earth.

This is complicated. Given the accelerating expansion of the universe, there's an eventual "horizon" where light beyond that limit will never manage to get here, simply because the empty space between here and there will expand faster than the light can make up the distance. My understanding is that under current cosmological models, a likely scenario is that eventually (on the order of multiple billion years), everything beyond our local gravitationally-bound group of galaxies (us, Andromeda, and a few hangers-on) will be 100% invisible forever. Kinda makes you wonder what distant-future astronomers might think of the old tales of "galaxy clusters" or "cosmic structure formation".
Moreover, A good number are in the Milky way or the Andromeda galaxy, which is bound to collide with ours; plus the respective satellite galaxies of the Milky Way + Andromeda.

Will Univers' expansion make even them "disappear"?