eli5: If space is expanding faster than light in all direction. Why hasn’t the space between our atoms expanded to infinite?

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eli5: If space is expanding faster than light in all direction. Why hasn’t the space between our atoms expanded to infinite?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s not expanding faster than light in **all** directions.
The shorter the distance the smaller the expansion rate. This also means, that the larger the distance the larger the expansion rate.

Things, within the local group of galaxies, are not moving away from each other, at least not because of the expansion, since the rate of expansion is smaller that the speed at which things are moving, and gravity is still the dominant player here.

Further away at larger distances we sometimes see galaxies moving towards us, but never overcomming the rate of expansion. So no matter how long they move towards us, they will never get here.

Even further away than that, at the largest distances, we see the rate of expansion exceeding the speed of light.

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