(June 23, 2014 at 1:39 am)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: She's insane. We know for a fact that galaxies don't move away from each other because we know that they merge together. We are merging with the Milky Way right now and the Milky Way will merge with Andromeda. We have pictures of galaxies merging.
No. 99.9999999% of all galaxies are moving away from our Milky Way, at a speed far in excess of the gravitational escape velocity of Milky Way, meaning they will never reverse course and come back towards us. Only 0.00000001% of all galaxies are moving with any hint of coming closer or merging with our Milky Way any time in the future.
It would be the same with any other galaxy.
On the scale of the visible universe, Expansion of universe vastly overmatched Mutual attraction between galaxies for all but the closest galaxies.