If The Universe Is 13.8 Billion Years Old, How Can We See 46 Billion Light Years Away?
Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist.
--
There are a few fundamental facts about the Universe — its origin, its history, and what it is today — that are awfully hard to wrap your head around. One of them is the Big Bang, or the idea that the Universe began a certain time ago: 13.8 billion years ago to be precise. That’s the first moment we can describe the Universe as we know it to be today: full of matter and radiation, and the ingredients that would eventually grow into stars, galaxies, planets and human beings. So how far away can we see? You might think, in a Universe limited by the speed of light, that would be 13.8 billion light years: the age of the Universe multiplied by the speed of light. But 13.8 billion light years is far too small to be the right answer. In actuality, we can see for 46 billion light years in all directions, for a total diameter of 92 billion light years.
Why is this? There are three intuitive ways we can choose to think about this problem, but only one of them is right.
1.) Stuff is everywhere, and light travels at the speed of light. This is the “default” mode most people have. You can imagine a Universe that’s full of stars and galaxies everywhere we look, and that these stars and galaxies began forming pretty close to the very beginning of everything. Therefore, the longer we wait, the farther we can see, as light travels in a straight line at the speed of light. So after 13.8 billion years, you’d expect to be able to see back almost 13.8 billion light years, subtracting only how long it took stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang.
2.) Stuff is everywhere, light moves at c, and everything can move through space. This adds another layer to the problem; not only is there a…
