Access Planetary | Information on planets and the universe

That would mean that the universe has expanded faster than the speed of light, which is improbable. I would also highly doubt that it expands anywhere near that fast. Or do they mean that it would take 25 billion light years to get back to the center of the universe from the outer edge due to the continued expansion of the universe? If so then that isnt a true indication of how wide the universe is at this present time. Any thoughts?

NONONO here is the correct Answer:

The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Light reaching us from the earliest known galaxies has been travelling, therefore, for more than 13 billion years. So one might assume that the radius of the universe is 13.7 billion light-years and that the whole shebang is double that, or 27.4 billion light-years wide.

But the universe has been expanding ever since the beginning of time, when theorists believe it all sprang forth from an infinitely dense point in a Big Bang.

"All the distance covered by the light in the early universe gets increased by the expansion of the universe," explains Neil Cornish, an astrophysicist at Montana State University. "Think of it like compound interest."

Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."

All the pieces add up to 78 billion-light-years. The light has not traveled that far, but "the starting point of a photon reaching us today after travelling for 13.7 billion years is now 78 billion light-years away," Cornish said. That would be the radius of the universe, and twice that — 156 billion light-years — is the diameter. That’s based on a view going 90 percent of the way back in time, so it might be slightly larger.

by
-Robert Roy Britt

There is more too it but he pretty much sums it up

Many people claim or believe that the universe is cyclic. I don’t understand, how would it work?

There are many theories about this. One of the more popular ones says that if there is enough "dark matter" in the universe, eventually gravity would cause the receding stars to stop receding and start heading back to the origin point of the Big Bang. Gravity would bring things together to the point that when it all collapsed, it would form a humongous black hole. However, black holes are not at all guaranteed to be stable. Therefore, if gravity led to "the big crunch" but that resulted in an unstable black hole (singularity is the preferred word here), the instability would lead to another bang. And start the cycle over again.

There are millions of galaxies in a universe right? And in those galaxies or just stars and planets right?

There is only one universe. The "universe" is what cosmologists call the totality of everything that they are able to observe.

Galaxies are clusters of stars (and other stuff), and like you said, they are IN the universe.