I understand that our local galaxy group is considered “gravitationally bound” and therefore exempt from the expansion from each other ((, but we don’t seem to have other galaxies collected into their own “local groups” of gravitationally bound clusters, so are we saying we’re somehow unique? Is there a trick of perception taking place?)) <—edit:this is wrong
I found this quote in the Wikipedia article on the Expansion of the universe.
While objects cannot move faster than light, this limitation applies only with respect to local reference frames and does not limit the recession rates of cosmologically distant objects.
It seems to me that if we can perceive at cosmological distance something that cannot exist, perhaps we are falsely observing an expanding universe. Maybe everything IS gravitationally bound and we’re just seeing expansion because… Relativity?
(Do note I’m not an astrophysicist, so this may be a bit wrong, but I think the main part of it is right.) Not exactly. Everything in the universe is constantly drifting away from everything else. The reason it is pretty much only visible at the scale of galactic clusters is that literally every force in the universe overpowers this expansion, unless the distances between the objects are truly absurd, in the range of millions or billions of light years.
This! A nice additional detail is that the expansion is accellerated, so there will be some interesting things happening when the relative strength of the fundamental forces start competing with the expansion.