This is a link to IFL Science's article about merging galaxies Hubble photos.
One of the comments asked why we aren't moving away from Andromeda, the galaxy nearest to our own Milky Way if everything's supposedly always expanding outward ...
I have no idea of course, since I'm not an expert or anything - but I have a feeling it might be the expansion of the galaxies, doing their bit of the outward thing, that brings them to the point of intersection; hence the merging.
It wouldn't affect the outward expansion of the whole; the two would continue on that path as a larger unit.
At least that's the way I see it.
When the joint Milky Way/Andromeda merged galaxy gets settled down some it will likely go through the whole procedure again with whatever solo or merged galaxy is close enough for its expansion to intersect with ours.
We of course aren't going to live to see any of it. Even if we did live long enough to be around for the occurrence we probably wouldn't notice it much, if at all. That's one reason the Hubble photos are so great - in a way we CAN see it!
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