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Can The Universe Expand Faster Than The Speed Of Light? (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]
“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” -Mario Andretti
One of the toughest things to wrap your mind around in the natural world is the idea of special relativity: the faster you move, the closer you get to the speed of light, the more difficult it becomes to increase your speed at all. While you might approach the speed of light arbitrarily and asymptotically, you’ll never reach it.
Public domain timelapse photo by flickr user comedynose (Pete), illustrating fast, relativistic motion. Image retrieved via https://www.flickr.com/photos/comedynose/23696582553.
And yet, we have the Universe, expanding all the time, where the expansion rate itself is even speeding up. You might wonder, then, if these distant galaxies — the farther and farther away you look — might ever be seen moving away from us faster than the speed of light? Surprisingly and mind-bendingly, the answer is yes.
Image credit: Ned Wright, based on the latest data from Betoule et al. (2014), via http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/sne_cosmology.html.
Go find out how we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory facts today!
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2016/06/10/can-the-universe-expand-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-synopsis/
