Is the most distant galaxy known moving away from us faster than the speed of light? #shorts

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]to when we see stretched out red-shifted light from galaxies, we could interpret that as the galaxies themselves moving.

[00:00:10]And for nearby galaxies, like what Hubble observed, they look like they're moving away from us at about 1,000 km a second. [music] But it's the most distant galaxies in the universe that cause the problems when we interpret red shift in this way. [music] For example, take the galaxy GN-Z11, which held the crown of most distant galaxy known for 7 years. It has a red shift factor of 10.603. [music] That means that the light has been traveling through the expanding universe to get [music] stretched by that factor for around about 13.36 [music] billion years. But if you think about the amount of distance [music] the light has covered in that time, correcting for the expansion of the universe, >> [music] >> you find that it's around 32 [snorts] billion light-years. So, if speed equals distance over time, that means GN-Z11 has an apparent speed away from us due to the expansion of space of 2.4 times the speed of light, appearing to break >> [music] >> Einstein's fundamental law of physics that nothing can go faster than the speed [music] of light. But the keyword in that sentence is appear. The galaxies themselves are not actually moving.

[00:01:26]What's actually happening is the distance between galaxies is getting larger as space expands, [music] which brings me to part two. Why the expansion of space doesn't have a speed limit.