Seeming conflict between most distant objects and age of universe (both estimated) There was a recent article on bbc.com for laypeople like me titled &quot;The mystery of how big our Universe really is&quot;, which prompted me to post the following question in their comments section of Facebook, which so far has received no answer, so I am reposting it here in the hope of a better result:
&quot;I have a simple question, which probably has an equally simple answer: if &quot;the furthest visible regions of the Universe are estimated to be around 46 billion light years away&quot; but at the same time &quot;the Universe burst into existence an estimated 13.8 billion years ago&quot;, wouldn't the photons (or whatever) that we observe coming from those distant objects have had to have begun their travel towards us long before the universe existed?&quot;
No conflict. The universe is expanding. The furthest/oldest object we can see emitted its photons approximately 13.4 billion years ago, but the universe has expanded since then and that object is now around 32 billion light-years away. See this answer or search the astronomy stack exchange for &quot;age of universe expansion&quot;.