 Although light and objects within spacetime cannot travel faster than the speed of light, this limitation does not restrict the metric itself.To an observer it appears that space is expanding and all but the nearest galaxies are receding into the distance.During the inflationary epoch about 10−32 of a second after the Big Bang, the universe suddenly expanded, and its volume increased by a factor of at least 1078 (an expansion of distance by a factor of at least 1026 in each of the three dimensions), equivalent to expanding an object 1 nanometer (10−9 m, about half the width of a molecule of DNA) in length to one approximately 10.6 light years (about 1017 m or 62 trillion miles) long.