Comment on wat
Objection@lemmy.ml 5 days agoThat’s intuitive but actually completely wrong. There is no “absolute” reference frame, and nothing can move faster than light in any relative reference frame.
The only thing that gets around that is the expansion of space itself. It’s not that the objects are moving away from each other, it’s that the distance between them is expanding, causing them to become farther apart.
The best analogy is to picture an ant crawling on the surface of an expanding balloon. If the balloon keeps expanding fast enough forever, the ant won’t be able to make it from point A to point B. It’s not really that the ant is moving away from point B, it’s just that the distance is expanding faster than it can move.
Rooster326@programming.dev 5 days ago
Okay but the ant can still only go at the speed of ant.
Allero@lemmy.today 5 days ago
Exactly! That’s why we have a concept of observable universe.
As the universe expands (think of it not as ants moving, but more space created between ants), at some distance away from us it starts doing so faster than light.
The light, however, can only travel at, well, the speed of light. As such, we will never see or reach anything that is beyond this light speed horizon. And as the expansion of the universe speeds up, more and more objects that we can still observe will disappear beyond this point.