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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Space isn’t expanding faster than the speed of light. According to google, it’s currently expanding at ~40 miles/second.
Our current best model is that space *briefly* expanded *extremely* fast, in an event known as inflation. This inflation began and ended in roughly 10^-33 seconds, an unbelievably short blip of time. No, I can’t tell you how we calculated that.
One possible distant future for the universe is called *the big rip*, where expansion keeps accelerating, and yes – if space keeps expanding faster, eventually it’ll happen faster than gravity holds galaxies and solar systems together, and eventually faster than the bonds holding molecules together. If this is truez it would happen on the scale of 100 billion to 1 trillion years in the future.
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