If the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old, and the diameter of the observable universe is 93 billion light years, how can it be that wide if the universe isn’t even old enough to let light travel that far that quickly?
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imagine the universe as just a balloon and every atom and photon as just a dot on the surface of the balloon. and in the beginning, even the balloon itself was just as big as a dot.
then suddenly something started blowing that balloon up and the dots, for the first time, gained some distance between them.
gravity did tried to pull them back together, but the balloon was growing too fast for now.
but while the balloon was so small, light was able to fly over quite a significant percentage of the circumference of ballon.
but the ballon was still growing very fast, and soon that previous distance seemed much farther, that’s the 93 billion lightyears.
after some time, of blowing “air” into the balloon, the surface needed to stretch less and less with each breath. until gravity could overpower the stretching and keep some dots together. and then gravity, and other forces keeping dots together, got so much stronger than the stretching, that some stickfigures emerged and didnt even notice anymore, that they were still being stretched.
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