Is the rate of expansion of the universe slowing down?

Question

The galaxies closer to us which represent a later time frame are moving away slower than the outer galaxies which represent an earlier time frame

Answer 1

It is impossible to tell because we cannot watch the edge of the universe, if there is one at all. It Is still not proven, that there is an expansion after all. Yes, we have the visible effect you describes, but that could also be an efffect of time and not of distance, because maybe, if there was an expansion, it was much greater in the early times of the universe.
However, there also some galaxies moving towards us ... does that mean, expansion would be inverted? no, not really, we know a little bit about the structures in our universal "neighborhood".
We move with our local group towards a cluster of galaxis calles Virgo. This one is moving (and pulling us and neighbors around us with it) towards a super cluster called COMA, and this one is moving (and pulling all with it) towards a giant structure called "The great wall" in a distance of about 3 billion ly.
But we cannot recognize, if there are any bigger structures than this "great wall" (we can difine some so called bubbles and big voids) and of so, whether and how they move ...
Therefore it is impossible to answer your question. We cannot see far enough ... and if we could, the pictures we get would be way too old. To answer this question one day, we got to travel at a velocity far greater than the speed of light, or we'll never ever know.

Answer 2

the enlargement of the universe isn't slowing down. the reason distant products bypass away faster is because the closer products are on a similar route to us, although the distant products are heading on a thoroughly diverse route. imagine twenty human beings in a circle all started operating faraway from one element on a similar % at the same time. those who all started out at opposite aspects of the point ought to become more advantageous distant from one yet another faster than those who were next to at least one yet another. One concept at one element replaced into that the universe's enlargement ought to decelerate, and then gravity ought to pull each and each and every of the products decrease back mutually till each and everything replaced into at one element, that may then reason yet another vast bang. maximum physicists have determined that this concept isn't maximum excellent.

Answer 3

The answer to this is controversial. There is contradictory evidence in both directions, with some recent evidence indicating the rate of expansion might actually be increasing. This is counter-intuitive, and is a subject of high interest in astronomy and cosmology right now.

Answer 4

Some dude named Freeman J. Dyson wrote about this. He said that as the Universe starts to slow down, humans, or any other life form will have to cope with less and less energy. As the expansion slows down, so does the energy. Here is his article. He mathematically proves that the universe is slowing down. It's kind of boring in the math parts, but the really interesting stuff is where he talks about humans coping with less and less energy. Check it: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt

Answer 5

Dark energy might cause the universe to speed up it's expansion.

Answer 6

PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 802 November 22, 2006 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein,
and Davide Castelvecchi www.aip.org/pnu

DARK ENERGY AT REDSHIFT Z=1. Dark energy, the unidentified force
that's pushing the universe to expand at ever faster rates, was
already at work as early as nine billion years ago, scientists
reported last week. New Hubble Space Telescope sightings of distant
supernova explosions support the explanation of dark energy as
energy of the vacuum whose density has stayed constant throughout
the universe's history, the scientists said. This cosmic
acceleration was first revealed in 1998 by two separate teams of
astrophysicists. By measuring the brightness of supernova explosions
from up to seven billion light years ago, the scientists discovered
an unexpected discrepancy. The supernovae appeared dimmer, and thus
farther, than expected from their measured red shifts. Put another
way, supernovae at a given distance were less redshifted than
expected. Because red shift measures how much light waves stretch as
the universe expands, the lower red shift meant that, early on, the
light from these distant supernovae had traveled in a universe that
was expanding at a slower rate than the current universe (whose rate
of expansion is known by other means). The then-widely accepted
model of cosmology required instead that the universe be slowing
down in its expansion, owing to the mutual gravitational tug of all
of the matter and energy contained in it.
Using the Hubble, a team led by Adam Riess, an astrophysicist at the
Space Telescope Science Institute and at Johns Hopkins University
has now observed 23 new supernovae dating back to 8 to 10 billion
years ago, he said in a Nov. 16 NASA press conference. That was an
era of intense star formation, when galaxies were three times as
bright as they are today. Until now, astronomers had only seen seven
supernovae from that period, Riess said, too few to measure the
properties of dark energy. The data show that the repulsive action
of dark energy was already active at that time, and are consistent
with a constant energy density -- in other words, with an energy of
the vacuum that does not dilute itself as the universe expands,
eventually fueling an exponential growth of the universe. More
complicated models with non-constant energy density -- including a
class known as quintessence models -- are not completely ruled out,
Riess said during the press conference: the new data still allows
for variations of up to 45 percent from constant density. "It's
still pretty crude," Riess said. For more recent ages, dark energy
is known to have been constant up to a 10 percent variation. Mario
Livio, another STScI astronomer who also was at hand at the press
conference, said, "The results only rule out certain variants of
quintessence models," but not all of them.
Lawrence Berkeley Lab astrophysicists Saul Perlmutter, who leads
another supernova search, says that this is a step in the right
direction, but that only a new, dedicated space telescope will be
able to constrain the variation enough to convince scientists that
dark energy is constant. "We expect that the differences will be
much more subtle between the various models of dark energy," he
says. Perlmutter says his team is also looking at supernovae from
the distant past, focusing on ones from dust-free regions of the
universe, in order to estimate the statistical and systematic
uncertainties of the measurements.
The new data also confirm the reliability of supernovae as signposts
of the universe's expansion, Riess said. The particular kind of
supernova used for this kind of measurement, called type Ia, takes
place when a white dwarf star becomes heavier by accreting matter
from a companion star, until -- at a critical mass of about 1.4
times the mass of our sun -- it undergoes a thermonuclear explosion.
Virtually all type Ia supernovae have very standard characteristics
-- they all follow the same cycle, have roughly the same brightness
and relative abundances of elements, as seen from their spectra.
This makes astrophysicists believe that type Ia's have a predictable
intrinsic brightness, making their distances easy to estimate. It
now appears that the same is true for the oldest supernovae, even
though the elemental composition of the universe as a whole was
different back then. (Paper available at
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0611572; to appear in Astrophysical
Journal, 10 February 2007; for images see
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html)

Answer 7

he universe's expansion is speeding up according to the latest calculations that have been verified by other teams.

Answer 8

Actually, there is a bit of evidence that it is speeding up. The astronomers are busy with their cameras on this.

Answer 9

Yes it is. And it is theorized that when everything slows to a stop it will reverse and eventually collapse back in upon itself.