Good question. If the universe has expanded from the center like a balloon, then wouldn't there be galaxies 26 billion L/Y away? Hopefully some Freeper better versed in astronomy will be around shortly to explain this.
Maybe the light hasn't gotten here yet!.......;^)
Okay, the Wiki link kind of answers the question, just as I postulated, the light has not arrived here yet.
The ‘observable’ universe, from our vantage point, consists of solely what WE can ‘see’, and other vantage points would give different ‘observable universes’, that may or may not overlap ours.
So, we live in a ‘bubble’ that is limited by the speed of light and distance to the edge of observations.
The inference is, therefore, that there is more ‘stuff’ out there that we cannot yet ‘see’ because it is too far away for the light to have arrived here.
So the astronomers create a ‘Dark Matter’ and ‘Dark Energy’ theory to account for the absence of that which they cannot yet see.
Has anyone ever postulated that there may have been a ‘Big Bang’ followed by numerous ‘Little Bangs’ that created successive ‘universes’ that are all the same approximate age, but for reasons of limits on the speed of light are not directly observable from one to another?
Each ‘Little Bang’ would be, to the observers inside its bounds, a ‘Big Bang’ that would not have enough ‘matter’ inside its boundaries to account for its own existence.
The ‘Universe’ may be much bigger than we have ever conceived, and contain much more than we thought possible..............