I just don’t get it.
According to the theory of special relativity, nothing can ever move faster than light speed.
But due to the expansion of the universe, sufficiently distant stars move away from us faster than the speed of light.
And the explanation is…that this universal speed limit doesn’t apply to things that are really far away?
Please make it make sense!
Think of the universe not as objects flying apart, but as the fabric of space itself stretching. The more distance there is between two objects, the more ‘new space’ is generated every second, across that entire distance.
Light travels 9.461 × 1015 meters per year. At a certain distance (the Hubble limit), more than 9.461 × 1015 meters of new space is created in a year. So for stars beyond the Hubble limit, the light sent from those stars actually ends up further from us after a year than when it started. That’s what “moving away from us faster than light” means.