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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The universe appears to be expanding at a uniform rate everywhere. The rate at which it expands depends on the distance you’re measuring.
If you have galaxies evenly spaced like this
A-B-C-D-E
and after a million years they’re like this
A–B–C–D–E
then you can see that C is now one dash farther from B, but *two* dashes farther from A. And A is four dashes farther from E. All in the same amount of time.
This is why we observe that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us. The galaxies themselves aren’t moving, it’s space itself that is expanding, and carrying the galaxies apart. So the more space is between them, the more space is expanding, so the faster they are receding. Add up all that cumulative space, and you can see that very distant galaxies are moving apart faster than the speed of light.
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