The flants living on their balloon have a hard time visualizing how their two dimensional world is expanding in time into a three dimensional space. So they create a simpler model. They imagine one dimensional creatures who live on a line. The line is curved into a circle. In this universe there is one creature and one star.
Light takes time to travel from the star to the creature.
So the creature sees the star as it was in the past. The flant in a line universe sees a star. The arc connecting the flant to the star is the path light follows through spacetime. At the big bang the circle begins as a very tiny circle. After 300,000 years it is a larger circle after 14 billion years it is a very large circle.