The universe

The universe is only 13.75 billion years old, and nothing can travel faster than light, right? Well, yes. But it's a bit more complicated than that.

In his Theory of Special Relativity, Einstein states that the speed is always constant whether or not the observer is. We know the universe is only 14 billion years old, yet we are able to see celestial bodies located 47 billion light-years away. This appears to go against what Einstein says.

The universe is constantly expanding and expansion is much different than motion. The concept of the speed of light is a limit on motion. If you think of these as two separate ideas, it starts to make more sense. Picture the universe as a loaf of raisin bread; the dough represents space-time (size of the universe) with the raisins representing galaxies. When the bread is baking, it’s rapidly expanding and the distance between the galaxies is getting larger. Now imagine this loaf of bread on your counter and you are sticking a skewer through it. How fast the skewer travels through the loaf would be limited. Just like with the skewer, objects moving through space-time are limited by the speed of light. However space-time (dough) itself is not.

So, to summarize: the universe is about 13.75 billion years old, but due to the expansion of space, humans are observing objects that were originally much closer but are now considerably farther away than a static 13.75 billion light-years distance. So we are able to see objects that are 47 billion light years away from us.