Well...first of all, according to Big Bang theory, which is based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, the distance between any two bodies in space may increase not just because the bodies themselves are moving, but because space itself is stretching. This is like a runner on a race track moving from the starting line to the finish line while at the same time the race track itself is being stretched a bit during the racer's trip.
I know this sounds a bit strange, but so far as we know, Einstein's theory of general relativity seems to be rather accurate based on several different kinds of experiments that have been used over the years to check it.
As for your question, we need to have some way of measuring its an object's distance at the present time. Believe it or not, this is not easy to do without knowing exactly which kind of universe we live in. The answer will actually be different depending on whether we live in a 'open' universe that will expand forever, or an 'closed' one destined to re-collapse in the future. In an article I wrote with for Sky and Telescope magazine on February 1993, I reexamined how we interpret the cosmological redshift in terms of distance and speed. Because of the stretching of space as the universe expands, and because we have no way to actually measure the distance to a galaxy very far away that is independent of the model of the universe we start with, questions like 'how far away is a quasar' and 'how long did it take to get there' cannot be answered independently of the model of the universe we are using.
What all of this boils down to is that a very distant object didn't get there by traveling from here to where it now is, like some fragment from a fireworks display. Instead, it is an independent clump of matter that was originally very far away from where we are, and the expansion of space has stretched the distance between us and that galaxy to where it is now. For example, in the case of the quasar PHL 957, astronomers measure its 'redshift' and find that it has a value of 2.720. By assuming that the universe is 'open' with an expansion rate of 50 kilometers per second per megaparsec, and an 'omega' parameter of 0.1, we can compute that for such a universe, we are seeing the quasar as it was 14 billion years ago and that its distance is 14 billion light years. Does that mean that it has been traveling at the speed of light all this time? No not according to general relativity. Most of this distance has come from the space stretching effect which has nothing to do with the speed of an object. The matter that makes up that quasar was NEVER mingled with the matter out of which our sun and Milky Way arose so it was never in any real sense 'close' to us to start with.
Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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