are there any examples of galaxies that are not moving opposite of the milky way (and i dont mean andromeda) ? if a distant galaxy was traveling slightly away from us but also at some angle, would that point to a possible origin for the big bang? also, how would a galaxy like that appear? would it be redshifted but less than a galaxy moving opposite of us?

I'm having a little trouble understanding your question. 

As long as a galaxy is moving away from us (at all) it is going to be moving directly away from us, not at some obscure angle. Think of dots on an expanding balloon: Every dot expands away from every other dot, and they all do it in apparent straight lines.

The only galaxies that aren't expanding away from us are the galaxies in our local cluster. This is due to the fact that the mutual gravity of the galaxies has reached an equilibrium between the outward push of expansion and the inward push of gravity. Should the expansion ever become so strong that it breaks this equilibrium, then it will tear apart our local cluster. If this were to happen on a universal scale, then the fate of the universe would become what astronomers call the "big rip".  

It sounds like you are trying to split the motion of galaxies into two components.  One being what ever motion thay might have relative to us if there were no expansion of the universe, and the other being the motion they have which is caused by the expansion of the universe.  For galaxies that are highly red shifted the motion they might otherwise have in relation to us is simply swamped by the motion away from us cause by the expansion of the universe.

 thanks, bullfox. thats exactly the kind of answer i was looking for. so theres absolutely no way to tell if a galaxy is moving relative to us and not just directly away due to expansion?

You're asking about what we call the proper motion of galaxies. The motion toward or away from us is called radial motion.

While we have been measuring the proper motion of stars for more than a century (because they're relatively nearby, within a hundred thousand light-years), galaxies are so far away it's very difficult to see their proper motion on human timescales.

However, beginning in 2005, radio astronomers began to map these motions for the nearest galaxies (click here for more info).

 thanks for the link, chip. but what about galaxies beyond the local cluster? do we not have the technology to measure their proper motion yet is it like bullfox said, that the universe is expanding too fast for us to measure their proper motion?

I would say that's the likely answer. Though I'm not an astronomer, so I can't say for sure. Since the velocity of galaxies is proportional to distance, v=dh, then it would make it harder and harder to observe the exact motion of individual galaxies the farther into space we look. That's why we're only able to observe the relative motion of galaxies who are our nearest neighbors.

RIP_Shadowfox:

do we not have the technology to measure their proper motion yet

It's not so much about the technology as it is about time.  Proper motion is easy to measure if an object is close because the distance traveled appears to be a greater percentage of our 'field-of-view'.  If you hold your thumb at arms length and move it six inches to the right it is easy to see the change.  If your arm was a mile long and you moved your thumb six inches a mile away the change would be much tougher to spot.  Distant galaxies are so far away that even large proper motions are nearly immeasureable from here.  We've only been watching for a few decades so they haven't moved far enough yet for their motions to become apparent.

 

Good answer, Terry!

 that was a really good answer.

 i notice that even though all galaxies appear redshifted, pictures of them never show them as red. is that because the filters we use show the true colors hidden behind the redshift or is it that the redshift only appears in a certain spectrum?

Redshift means that the wavelengths (all wavelengths) are shifted to lower frequencies. NOT that all wavelengths become red in color. An emission line in the UV might only be moved into the near UV or into the blue spectral range (it is still red shifted). But the answer is yes objects at cosmological distances do not appear as they would if they were not “red-shifted”. Distant objects that radiate the majority of their radiation in the UV (invisible in normal light) show themselves quite well in blue sensitive film/CCD, for example.

 

“is that because the filters we use show the true colors hidden behind the redshift”

 

This type of a statement as stated makes no sense. A comparison would be made by comparing the spectra of the objects lines and those of control lines from spectra developed in the laboratory. These types of statements lead me to believe that you could gain a much better knowledge of these concepts from a good textbook.

 While you seem to enjoy discussing many concepts at the edge of known physics or even at the level of conjecture, having a good grounding in KNOWN physics would make that a much more enjoyable and understandable occupation.

 

RIP_s:

A key concept you seem to be missing here is that the redshift we measure is very, very small. We talk about "cosmological redshifts" as if they're Huge. They are, in fact, so tiny they're extremely difficult to measure.

The consequence of this is that the visible wavelengths of light appear to your eye to be unchanged. The light from a galaxy is broadband (it fills the electromagnetic spectrum). The way we measure its redshift is to disperse that light into a spectrum and look at the spectral lines of elements whose positions we know (from analyzing the light from those elements in a laboratory). This calibrates our spectrograph so that when we find the shifted lines we can calculate how much they've shifted.

When light comes from a massive object, it also is gravitationally red-shifted (the light has to "climb out of the object against its gravity", if you will). So a correction factor must be applied for that, as well.

The cosmological redshift occurs because spacetime itself is expanding. One way to think about that is to imagine that the "ruler" we use to measure large distances in space is stretching, as well. That allows the different light components to be measured as if the galaxy were standing still, relative to one another, except for the gravitational and rotational components of the redshift. Our challenge is to find the amount by which the ruler has stretched: the cosmological redshift.

 thanks for the replies, guys