Space Fact - Milky Way Galaxy
Milky Way Galaxy. Home to planet Earth. The Milky Way is a part of a large group of galaxies known as the Local Group consisting of more than 54 gravitationally bound members. Most of them are quite small with the exception of Andromeda, the Milky Way and Triangulam.
A few billion years into the future,these larger members will collide and eventually form a much larger galaxy nicknamed Milkdromeda.
Now lets go much further into the future, about 100 billion years from now. Imagine that somewhere within Milkdromeda, a habitable planet gives rise to a civilization of intelligent beings much like ourselves. At some point they invent a powerful new telescope which will allow them to explore space beyond the galaxy. But as they peek through the telescope, they find nothing. Nothing but darkness and empty space. They come to understand that they exist within a seemingly endless and almost informationless void.
Milkdromeda would appear to be a bastion of light in a sea of darkness. It may sound like science fiction but it's actually a very plausible future. As the age of the cosmos approach 100 billion, the expansion of the universe will cause all other galaxies to vanish beyond the cosmic light horizon. This means that light from other galaxies will no longer be able to reach us.
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| COSMIC LIGHT HORIZON |
Put another way galaxies will be pushed outside of the observable universe and can thus no longer be observed. Everything outside of the Milkdromeda galaxy will be virtually erased from existence. Just like observers in other galaxies will experience the exact same phenomenon.If you think about it, we are rather fortunate to exist at a point in time when we have access to such an abundance of information.
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| Hubble Telescope |
The distant future of 100,000,000,000 CE however, would be so information deprived that when they aim their equivalent of the Hubble telescope towards a seemingly empty region of space, the returned image would also be empty.
And even though many questions could still be answered by studying other phenomena, like hypervelocity stars and cosmic microwave background, so much of the universe would be out of reach and, consequently, unknowable.
Of course, the same is true today. We have no way of knowing what lies beyond the observable universe.So just as we imagine our populated bubble to be a reflection of what lies beyond, intelligent inhabitants of an isolated Milkdromeda may do the same.
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