Ender, good questions. Since I have no idea what the answers are, let me just say this:
I’ve tried and tried to think of a more awesome headline, but this one is truly the coolest one ever.
Normally, I would do that. But in this case, I thought the headline said it all.
I will, but I might be running a little late though. I’ll call if it’s going to be more than a few minutes.
Some early spectrograph testing indicates that it may be made of spaghetti? Damn!
Blessed be His Noodly Appendage
Cosmology is not my specialty, so I cannot answer all of your questions, but I think that this site might help. The expansion of the universe is not limited by the speed of light, thanks to general relativity. Our observations are limited by the speed of light, but the actual expansion of space is not. See also the wikipedia entries for Universe and for Observable Universe.
In honor of the upcoming mother’s day:
Your mamma so old and fat, that scientists just discoverd her as a giant mystery blob at the dawn of time!
And as to how things are further away in the universe than they seem like they should, one factor (though I don’t think the only one,) is that the space between space is getting bigger. Take two pieces of paper taped to a ballon. They start off close, but if you inflate the balloon, they get further away even though you didn’t move the piece of paper itself. Not a perfect analogy, but it gets part of the point across.