The special theory of relativity says nothing can travel faster than light. So how is it that our universe is 93 billion light-years across and only 13.8 billion years old? That is to say, how did the universe get so big, in such a short amount of time?
This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows the Grand Design Spiral, also known as NGC 3631, located some 53 million light-years away from Earth. Our universe is about 13.8 billion years old, and the observable bubble of that cosmos has a diameter of about 93 billion light-years across.
Locally, no galaxy is moving. But the space between them is. So there are no restrictions here based on the speed of light because they’re. There’s no limit to how quickly space can expand and so the universe can grow as quickly as it pleases. Essentially, the universe is so big because it can expand faster than light. In fact, it’s doing so today. We measure the present-day expansion rate of the universe with something called theThat means for every megaparsec in distance you get away from the Milky Way, the universe’s expansion speed will increase by 68 km/s. A galaxy two megaparsecs away appears to recede at 136 km/s, a galaxy ten megaparsecs away will recede at 680 km/s, and so on.
The same would be true if you and I were to stand on opposite ends of a stretchy rubber band. As long as the rubber band didn’t break, as long as the stretching maintained a constant speed, at some point we would appear to be moving away from each other faster than light. .The light from galaxies beyond the Hubble radius was released billions of years ago and is only just now reaching the Earth.
Since most of the universe is beyond the Hubble radius, all those galaxies are forever out of reach. As time goes on, those galaxies will, one by one, disappear entirely from view. Not through any cheating of the laws of physics, but through simple stretching.
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