If light travels at a finite speed and nothing travels faster than light...

Then how did anything manage to get so far away that it can not be seen?

Because space in the inflation period expanded faster than light.The light speed limit is only for objects who have mass.

Welcome to BAUT Forum.

You might enjoy the Cosmology Tutorial of Ned Wright. You'll like his surname, if nothing else.

His Cosmology FAQ touches on your assumption:

... which then quickly descends into mathematics, so be prepared.

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Something like m1omg said. Inflation is an event hypothesized to have
occurred during the first second of the Universe's existance -- or at least,
during the first second after the Big Bang. In it, everything got spread
out in a vastly larger volume than it occupied an instant earlier. What
might have caused this expansion isn't known exactly, but would likely be
a change in the state of the matter filling the Universe analogous to the
change from liquid to gas when the pressure on liquid propane is reduced.

It is conceiveable that the Universe is infinite in extent. If it is, then it
has always been infinite, so things did not "get" far away, they have
always been far away.

The speed of light limitation is "local". That means it does not strictly
apply when you take gravity into account. In special relativity, the
speed of light is an absolute limit. General relativity goes beyond SR,
accounting for gravity, and effectively relaxing the speed limit over
cosmologically-large distances and in places where gravity is very
intense.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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"The other planets?
Well, they just happen to be there, but the point of rockets is to explore them!"
-- Kai Yeves

The part about nothing traveling faster than light is a popular oversimplification of reality. In fact Einstein's theory of special relativity limits our ability to observe objects traveling faster than light in two ways:

1. The restriction applies only to measurements made in a local inertial reference frame
2. The restriction applies only to objects which have a non-zero rest mass

A reasonable translation into plain language tells us that the measurement must be made locally to us, in a reference frame that is not accelerated with respect to us, and that only "ordinary" objects count, those which have a mass we can measure if they are at rest with respect to us.

So, one way around the restriction on going faster than light is to make clear the distinction between two different kinds of motion:

1. An object moving through inertial space
2. An object moving with accelerated space

Another reasonable translation into plain language is the difference between an object moving through space, or an object moving along with moving space. It looks more complicated than it really is, but it does require a different notion of an "expanding universe" than most people are likely to have.

When we think of big bang cosmology, and the idea of an expanding universe, we typically think of something like a huge ball of galaxies expanding away from each other like the pieces of an explosion. It's a convenient way to see things, but it is unfortunately wrong. The real physics of an expanding universe tells is that space itself is expanding.

So you see you have to replace the old idea of "space" being nothing but the emptiness through which things move with the new idea of "space" being something physical, with physical properties that affect the things (like galaxies & galaxy clusters) that are embedded in it. That's what Einstein's theory of general relativity does to us.

In the correct, scientific (as opposed to popular) concept of big bang cosmology, it is the space (more correctly the spacetime but we won't worry over the time part for the moment) of the universe which expands, it is the space which is moving, and that moving space drags the galaxies and galaxy clusters along with it. Now the big trick is this: Space can move faster than light. In fact, space can move as fast as it feels like moving, arbitrarily faster than light. So the universe can & does expand faster than the speed of light.

See the article Misconceptions about the Big Bang by Charles Lineweaver & Tamara Davis, in the February 2005 issue of Scientific American. Or see their prior work: Expanding Confusion: Common Misconceptions of Cosmological Horizons and the Superluminal Expansion of the Universe, Davis & Lineweaver, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia 21(1): 97-109, 2004 (follow the green arXiv link to a PDF preprint). The former article from SciAm is intended for the "general reader", whereas the latter paper from PASA is intended for readers with a firm background in science & math.

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As always Tim you have provided good explanations to the questions asked. I have read the links you provided and although some of the points stated in these links have been quoted to me before, reading through the links have cleared up some of my misconceptions too!

Oh and welcome to the forum DMWright! you will find it very enlightening!!

Thanks, I've been quietly reading all the linked info, fascinating stuff... I'll reply later once it's all sunk in.

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.