Our cosmic destiny turns on the shape of this graph. With accelerated expansion, space will continue to spread indefinitely, dragging away distant galaxies ever farther and ever faster. A hundred billion years from now, any galaxies not now resident in our neighborhood (a gravitationally bound cluster of about a dozen galaxies called our “local group”) will exit our cosmic horizon and enter a realm permanently beyond our capacity to see. Unless future astronomers have records handed down to them from an earlier era, their cosmological theories will seek explanations for an island universe,
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