I took an astronomy course at Vanderbilt more than fifty years ago; an enjoyable and thought-provoking course which informs the following:
Something of indeterminately large size, a singularity, may have exploded, or unimaginably expanded, billions of years ago, ejecting material which would one day form the observable heavenly bodies.
Was there within that Something, or singularity, other constituent material which was ejected, which we cannot yet see or detect, if this explosion, or expansion, occurred?
The Something which may have exploded, expanded, would have to have been located somewhere, relatively speaking. No, I have no idea where the Something may have been, and I am weary of conflating exploded with expanded.
All, most(?), some(?), of that post-explosion ejecta would one day coalesce into stars, planets, moons, comets, and asteroids, et al, which would then, eventually, be captured by gravitation or by some as yet undetected force, to become part of a galaxy or some other many-light-years-wide and distant space entity.
On 7April2022 the farthest astronomical object to date was detected and has been named HD1. Maybe the object is a galaxy. Maybe it is a massive black hole. Maybe it is an object never before encountered. HD1 is determined to be approximately 13.5 billion light years from Earth.
Further, astronomers estimate in the article that HD1 formed and began shining in ‘extremely bright ultraviolet light’ approximately 300 million years after Something went BANG!!
Cool. . . but hold on for a minute because distances time-and-distance-wise aren’t adding up.
The Something which may have gone BANG!! was at relative POINT A when it blew. Is not important the location of that Something’s relative POINT A, or is it?
What is important is that recently detected HD1, be it galaxy or black hole or ‘to be determined’, was ostensibly formed from explosively ejected material and began radiating its light an estimated 300 million years after Something went BANG!!. . . maybe.
But wait; HD1‘s UV light, traveling at 6.2 trillion miles per year, took 13.5 billion years to reach our astronomers’ instruments from HD1’s relative POINT B.
How far away is HD1 estimated to be right now, given that its light took 13.5 billion years to reach our instruments; given that the object has to our knowledge never slowed down?
Beginning to see where this is going? Maybe not yet because this is confusing. . . to me, too.
In a mere 300 million years, it is estimated that HD1 formed and began emitting UV light which then took 13.5 billion years to be detected on Earth.
If the Something which may have gone BANG!! was at relative POINT A when it blew, so that part of its ejected material which would eventually form HD1 coalesced in about 300 million years and began emitting ultraviolet light from its relative POINT B, then how did HD1 get 13.5 billion light years away from detection station Earth in only 300 million years, unless. . . no, it couldn’t be. . . HD1‘s constituent material was traveling faster than the speed of light?
Couldn’t be, because if HD1’s constituent material was traveling faster than the speed of light then we would never have detected its light. . . right?
No one in class long ago thought to bring this up for discussion, and why the question has taken a half century to bake in my head is a mystery, but the question seems germane to a larger discussion about a perceived yet not reconciled inequality between the time HD1 and other space entities formed after the supposed BANG!! and the time required for their respective observable light, of whatever nature, to arrive.
Please, astronomers, any one, set my thinking straight on this matter if you will. Am I missing an otherwise obvious aspect of the manner in which our universe is perceived?