Here is an age of the Virgo cluster from a few years back:

But some stars have been observed in the M100 galaxy of the Virgo Cluster, about 100 million light years from the Earth.

Villard, Ray; Freedman, Wendy L. (1994-10-26). “Hubble Space Telescope Measures Precise Distance to the Most Remote Galaxy Yet”. Hubble Site. Retrieved 2007-08-05; see also: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/virgo.html

Reasons why speed of light may not be the fastest game in town or was constant:

A 2008 quantum physics experiment also performed by Nicolas Gisin and his colleagues in Geneva, Switzerland has determined that in any hypothetical nonlocal hidden-variables theory the speed of the quantum non-local connection (what Einstein called spooky action at a distance) is at least 10,000 times the speed of light.

Salart; Baas; Branciard; Gisin; Zbinden (2008). “Testing spooky action at a distance”. Nature 454 (7206): 861–864.

Taken from a supplement for a church study group:

While much of science is based on the absoluteness of the speed of light, scientists have long speculated that there are things in the universe that move faster than the prescribed light. There is finally a laboratory experiment proving such a feat and it has been published so other scientists can go over it with a fine-tooth comb to see if there are any mistakes in the study.

The team has published its work so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes.

If it does not, one of the pillars of modern science will come tumbling down.

Antonio Ereditato added “words of caution” to his Cern presentation because of the “potentially great impact on physics” of the result.

The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics – as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity – depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.

“We tried to find all possible explanations for this,” the report’s author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening.

“We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects – and we didn’t. ….(BBC NEWS)

So even the “light years” you hear spoken of may also be relative – only time will tell.

This turns ALL physics on its head, by the way!

Virgo images suggest smaller universe – observations of a galaxy in the Virgo cluster indicate that objects in the universe may be half as far away as previously thought.

For the first time, astronomers have distinguished individual stars in a galaxy in the Virgo cluster and measured their distance from Earth. Observations of the galaxy NGC 4571, made with a new high-resolution camera, support the notion that objects in the universe may lie about half as far away as previously thought. If so, the cosmos as a whole may be smaller than believed.

Robert D. McClure of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, British Columbia, and his colleagues conducted their study at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. They photographed NGC 4571, obtaining sharp enough resolution to distinguish bright individual stars from groups of fainter stars. By comparing the brightness of the luminous stars with that of Milky Way stars in the same class and at a known distance from Earth, they deduced that NGC 4571 lies 50 million light-years from Earth.

Because astronomers often use the distance to Virgo as a yardstick for assessing the distance of objects farther out in the universe, the new finding indicates that such objects may lie much closer to Earth, McClure says. Since an object’s distance serves as an indicator of its age, a smaller cosmos would seem to suggest that the universe is younger than the estimated 10 to 20 billion years. On the other hand, scientists have clearly established an age of 15 billion years for some ancient star groups in the Milky Way.

The high-resolution camera attached to the Mauna Kea telescope uses adaptive optics to correct for the image-distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere (SN: 6/8/91, p.358), yielding an image about five times as sharp as those produced by most other ground-based telescopes, McClure says.

A recommended Resource: Distant Starlight – A Forum