Which astronomer is credited with discovering that the Universe is expanding?
Static universe cosmological constant to his equations of general relativity to counteract the attractive effects of gravity on ordinary matter, which would otherwise cause a static, spatially finite universe to either collapse or expand forever. This model of the universe became known as the Einstein World or Einstein's static universe. This motivation ended after the proposal by the astrophysicist and Roman Catholic priest Georges Lemaître that the universe seems to be not static, but expanding. Edwin Hubble had researched data from the observations made by astronomer Vesto Slipher to confirm a relationship between redshift and distance, which forms the basis for the
Future of an expanding universe Future of an expanding universe Observations suggest that the expansion of the universe will continue forever. If so, then a popular theory is that the universe will cool as it expands, eventually becoming too cold to sustain life. For this reason, this future scenario once popularly called "heat death" is now known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze. If dark energy—represented by the cosmological constant, a "constant" energy density filling space homogeneously, or scalar fields, such as quintessence or moduli, "dynamic" quantities whose energy density can vary in time and space—accelerates the expansion of the universe, then the space