> Space is a real thing that can expand. If you’ve heard phrases like “the fabric of spacetime” or “the spacetime continuum”, these are actually real, not just some sci-fi mumbo jumbo. You can imagine a big rubber sheet, on which all the planets and stars and everything are sitting. If you label this sheet with a grid and stretch it out, you’ll see that stuff gets further apart, but it doesn’t change position on the grid. That’s how space expands: it doesn’t move things, it just makes the distance between them bigger. (Note: don’t take this analogy too far: unlike rubber, space can stretch infinitely, and it doesn’t “snap back” into place).

This is kind of a problematic way of thinking, because there isn't any objective sense in which space or spacetime can move or stretch. Those kinds of effects only ever represent subjective choices, often made to simplify a mathematical problem. They are coordinate choices, specifically. The only objective property of a point in spacetime is its (tensor) curvature.

For example, the idea of space expanding is a coordinate choice. It's equally valid to just say that objects are moving apart.

(How, then, can things recede "faster than light"? Just as it's not possible to uniquely define the angle between arrows drawn at different places on a curved sheet, relative velocities of distant objects in curved spacetimes are not meaningful.)