Thread: Is the expansion of the universe accelerating or slowing?

Hi, this is my first post here. I have been reading a book called "A short history of nearly everything" by Bill Bryson which has caused many sleepless nights and inspired me to sign up here to discuss some of them.

My first thought, as the title suggests, is to understand the expansion of the universe. I have Googled it and it appears to be of somewhat debate.

What do you think? Is the universe expanding or is time stretching? Is the expansion accelerating or slowing down due to the pull of gravity?

I hope this hasn't already been a recent discussion here!

Le-roy.

From what I've read, the expansion of the universe is speeding up- due to a phenomena that we know little about at this time called 'dark energy'. I'm pretty sure that the eventual 'fate' of our universe depends upon the acceleration/deccelaration- which in turn depends upon the critical density of matter in our universe, given by



Where is Hubble's Constant.

A good website with a bit of background information is located here:

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~dfabricant/huchra/hubble/

Hope that helps a bit...