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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morrus" data-source="post: 5698020" data-attributes="member: 1">As I understand it from my reading of popular science books and podcasts and the like - and a physicist can correct me if I'm wrong - but the short answer is:  yes.  It did expand much faster than light speed in the early expansion phase, and those things furthest from us (beyond our appoximately 15 billion light year theoretical observable universe ability to detect them) are receding much faster than light speed.  We'll never detect them.However, the English terminology can confuse us.  Something can be receding away from us, but that doesn't mean it's physically moving through space at faster than light speed and thus breaking the universal speed limit.  It's not that they're moving through space, it's that the space is expanding - or, to put it another way, extra space is being added between us and them.  This isn't movement in the way we think of the term movement; it creates the appearance of movement, but that requires motion through space, which is not what they're actually doing.**Obviously they are moving through space as well, as nothing is stationary, but that's totally separate to the expansion.One weird effect of this is that - given that the expansion of the universe is accelerating - things will start to disappear from our view because they're "travelling" (again, the wrong word) away from us faster than the light from them is moving towards us.  So the objects in our observable universe will gradually fade from our view, and it will become more and more empty.  This is a long way in the future, of course.  The ultimate effect of that, ignoring the whole sun-dying-end-of-our-world aspect which will come first, is that eventually the night sky will be empty and there will be no way to detect those objects.  If our records don't survive, future astronomers will simply have no way to know they're not in an empty universe because information (in whatever form - light, gravity waves, etc.) cannot move towards them as fast as the objects themselves are being carried away by expansion.  But yes, in short - space can "expand faster than the speed of light" because it doesn't require motion; but the words we use in conversation here can make that confusing.  Physicists use equations and stuff to say it accurately, but we normal people don't talk that language and have to rely on our bad analogies and vague terms!Physicists, feel free to chime in!</blockquote>

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