So planets orbit stars. Stars orbit the galaxy. The galaxy forms super clusters with other galaxies moving through space.
What do galaxies orbit and when they form super clusters, what do they orbit/what determines direction/speed/etc of their movement?
From my understanding Andromeda and the milky way will one day collide in a billion years. So we’re obviously pulling each other together. Whats then pulling us along?
In: Physics
Momentum and gravity.
Gravity gets pretty weak on inter-galactic scales, but the masses involved are also incredibly large, so superclusters pull on other superclusters, and so on. But that’s a relatively weak force…mostly it’s because the superclusters are moving (relative to each other) and there’s nothing to stop them.
Even when the Milky Way and Andromeda run into each other we mostly won’t notice…there’s so much empty space even in a “dense” region like a galaxy that almost nothing is actually going to directly collide. But there’s going to be a lot of weird gravitational effects as very large masses get very close to each other.
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