• Tlaloc_Temporal
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    5 hours ago

    Are you sure that galaxies are growing? They’re gravitationally bound enough to have organized orbits, do those orbits get larger over time?

    • davidgro@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      My understanding was that in a gravitationally bound system like that, the orbits would be slightly larger (or slower for the same distance) based on the rate of expansion and the distance, but not grow any unless the rate of expansion increases. Like maybe the earth is a few angstroms farther from the sun than in a not expanding universe, but that number doesn’t change as long as the expansion keeps going the same. Same for galaxies and clusters.

      • Tlaloc_Temporal
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        2 hours ago

        At the planetary scale, such a change would be completely overpowered by other orbit defining effects, like resonance, mass flow/loss, and even drag.

        At the cluster scale, I can absolutely see spacetime expansion overpowering gravity.

        At the galaxy level, I can’t tell. Does spacetime expansion limit the size of galaxies? Is that limit shrinking due to the acceleration of expansion? Are galaxies under that limit larger than otherwise expected? Is this effect large enough to effect the speed of galaxy rotation and does it need to be taken into accout when measuring the effects of dark matter?