Reply #24: An answer to your question from Scientific American [View All]

I highlighted the part that I think is particularly applicable:

Yes. Hubble's Law, v = Hd, tells us that a galaxy that is d megaparsecs away from us will be receding at velocity v. And if we take the current best measurement of Hubble's constant H (72 kilometers per second per megaparsec), simple algebra predicts that galaxies 4.2 gigaparsecs (4.2x109 parsecs) away are receding at velocity c. More distant galaxies recede faster than c. This indeed violates special relativity--but that's not a problem because over such cosmological distances general relativity applies. Special relativity assumes that spacetime is flat and not expanding, while general relativity happily deals with a curved, expanding spacetime.

In general relativity the speed limit c only applies locally: One cannot have a particle traveling faster than c relative to another particle that is nearby. To compare velocities over very large distances in a curved, expanding universe requires some sophisticated mathematics. It is no longer as simple as measuring a distance and seeing how fast the distance changes.

Let's say galaxy Omega is 5 gigaparsecs away. The distance between us and galaxy Omega will be increasing at a rate faster than c. But that is because the spacetime between us and galaxy Omega is itself stretching and becoming larger at that rate, not because galaxy Omega is exceeding the speed of light in its local part of spacetime. This description may sound like doubletalk, but it is grounded in well-defined mathematics of curved spacetimes.

If we could build a telescope to see across 4.2 gigaparsecs what would we see? We can't see that far. The galaxies that we see a billion light years away appear to us today as they were a billion years ago. Before our telescope "reaches" 4.2 gigaparsecs, what we can see runs so far back in time that we hit the Big Bang, or more precisely, we hit the first moment at which light began traveling freely through space. In a sense we can already "see" that far: that oldest and farthest traveling light is none other than the cosmic microwave background.

This answer has also glossed over details such as the changing rate of expansion of the universe over the aeons, which modifies the simple law v = Hd, but the principles remain the same.

... Taken from here

The part about Time/space stretching is the part that I think will apply to the inflation following the Big Bang - I'm not sure that this is the actual answer.