DMWright, m1omg's answer to your question is correct. Tim Thompson provided a considerable amount of additional information all of which is also correct.
Other facts relevant to this thread are the following:
The special theory of relativity tells us that it would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with finite mass from rest in a given inertial frame to the speed of light in the same frame and that that energy would have been translated by E = mc^2 into an infinite amount of mass. No energy is needed to accelerate a massless object to the speed of light, but even such an object cannot be accelerated beyond the speed of light.
An inertial space is one relative to which a mass on which no force is acting is either stationary or moving in a fixed direction with constant speed. I'm not aware of any sense in which the concept of an accelerated space would be useful.
During the inflationary epoch less than 10^-43 seconds after time 0, the expansion of the Universe was extraluminal, that is, points moved apart faster than the speed of light. It has not done so since then, and the cause offered for this event is such that there is no expectation that it will ever happen again.
Last edited by dcl; 12-May-2008 at 01:22 AM.
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