Question

what is the acceleration of the expanding universe?

Answer 1

@.Sam. @3rika16 @Diyadiya @Vincent-Lyon.Fr @vangogh<3 ..how did the scientists calculate it?

Answer 2

lol may i also be there

Answer 3

Editor's Note: This story was originally printed in the February 2004 issue of Scientific American. We are reposting this story because author Adam Riess was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2008 by the MacArthur Foundation.

From the time of Isaac Newton to the late 1990s, the defining feature of gravity was its attractive nature. Gravity keeps us grounded. It slows the ascent of baseballs and holds the moon in orbit around the earth. Gravity prevents our solar system from flying apart and binds together enormous clusters of galaxies. Although Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for gravity to push as well as pull, most physicists regarded this as a purely theoretical possibility, irrelevant to the universe today. Until recently, astronomers fully expected to see gravity slowing down the expansion of the cosmos.

In 1998, however, researchers discovered the repulsive side of gravity. By carefully observing distant supernovae—stellar explosions that for a brief time shine as brightly as 10 billion suns— astronomers found that they were fainter than expected. The most plausible explanation for the discrepancy is that the light from the supernovae, which exploded billions of years ago, traveled a greater distance than theorists had predicted. And this explanation, in turn, led to the conclusion that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up, not slowing down. This was such a radical finding that some cosmologists suggested that the falloff in supernova brightness was the result of other effects, such as intergalactic dust dimming the light. In the past few years, though, astronomers have solidified the case for cosmic acceleration by studying ever more remote supernovae.

But has the cosmic expansion been speeding up throughout the lifetime of the universe, or is it a relatively recent development— that is, occurring within the past five billion years or so? The answer has profound implications. If scientists find that the expansion of the universe has always been accelerating, they will have to completely revise their understanding of cosmic evolution. But if, as cosmologists expect, the acceleration turns out to be a recent phenomenon, researchers may be able to determine its cause—and perhaps answer the larger question of the destiny of the universe—by learning when and how the expansion began picking up speed.

Battle of Titans
ALMOST 75 YEARS AGO astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe by observing that other galaxies are moving away from ours. He noted that the more distant galaxies were receding faster than nearby ones, in accordance with what is now known as Hubble’s law (relative velocity equals distance multiplied by Hubble’s constant). Viewed in the context of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Hubble’s law arises because of the uniform expansion of space, which is merely a scaling up of the size of the universe.

In Einstein’s theory, the notion of gravity as an attractive force still holds for all known forms of matter and energy, even on the cosmic scale. Therefore, general relativity predicts that the expansion of the universe should slow down at a rate determined by the density of matter and energy within it. But general relativity also allows for the possibility of forms of energy with strange properties that produce repulsive gravity. The discovery of accelerating rather than decelerating expansion has apparently revealed the presence of such an energy form, referred to as dark energy.

Whether or not the expansion is slowing down or speeding up depends on a battle between two titans: the attractive gravitational pull of matter and the repulsive gravitational push of dark energy. What counts in this contest is the density of each. The density of matter decreases as the universe expands because the volume of space increases. (Only a small fraction of matter is in the form of luminous stars; the bulk is believed to be dark matter, which does not interact in a noticeable way with ordinary matter or light but has attractive gravity.) Although little is known about dark energy, its density is expected to change slowly or not at all as the universe expands. Currently the density of dark energy is higher than that of matter, but in the distant past the density of matter should have been greater, so the expansion should have been slowing down then.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=expanding-universe-slows-then-speeds

Answer 4

the Hubble constant , that isn't constant