re: No matter what direction we point a telescope, we always look toward the Big Bang - why?

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We don't because, the best we know, it is expanding at the speed of light.

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Over massive distances space can actually expand faster than the speed of light, which is why there is a point all around us which, if we traveled at the speed of light for eternity, we'd never be able to reach (that point or anything beyond it).

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Consider an image like this: 10,000 of the faintest, most distant galaxies we’ve ever discovered. By measuring their redshifts, we can determine (going back to Hubble’s law) precisely how far away these galaxies are.

And as it turns out, about 40% of the galaxies in this image are already unreachable, even for a beam of light that left today.

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And as the Universe continues on in time, more and more galaxies are redding out as the Universe continues to accelerate. With each second that goes by (on average) thousands of stars and their planetary systems cross that horizon forever, and leave our ability to reach them for all eternity. Of the hundreds of billions of galaxies (maybe even as many as a trillion) in our Universe today, only about 3% of them are still reachable.

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