Wednesday, January 1, 2025

How is Andromeda still 2.5 million light years away and the universe is expanding faster than light?

 People don’t realize how big the universe is. Andromeda is so close that gravity causes it to move towards us rather than away from us, and will collide with our galaxy in a billion years.



You have to look at galaxies 10x farther away to find that they are consistently moving away from us, and they are moving much slower than light. The farther away they are, the faster they go. If we can see it, though, it wasn’t going faster than light when it was emitted.


So is there any sense to the statement that the universe is expanding faster than light? There are certainly places in the universe we can’t see, which in theory are moving away faster than light. Also, if dark energy and the accelerated expansion of the universe is true, there are galaxies we can see now at the edge of visibility which are accelerating, and so will redshift into invisibility over billions of years and theoretically will be moving faster than light.



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