I know that the universe is 13 billion years old and the fastest anything could be is the speed of light so if the universe is expanding as fast as it could be wouldn’t the universe be 13 billion light years big? But I’ve searched and it’s 93 billion light years big, so is the universe expanding faster than the speed of light?
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Yes the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light,
at large scales
that distinction is important. Locally the expansion of the universe is somewhere between 65 and 75 km per megaparsec. Now a parsec is about 30.9 trillion km, so for every million of those the universe is expanding around 70 km. That’s a very small amount. But the universe is HUGE and that expansion is happening everywhere so all those slow little expansions add up to a huge amount when two points are millions to billions of light years apart. So at the very edge of the visible universe, it is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. So there is stuff out there that is disappearing from our ability to see it because the light will never have time to reach us.
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