NASA astronauts Steven Smith and John Grunsfeld perform a spacewalk during a December 1999 mission of the space shuttle Discovery to service the Hubble Space Telescope.
In my post from Jan 30, 2019 (“Dark Energy is Getting Stronger”), I referenced new data out of the University of Florence and Durham University in England, via NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton spacecraft, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which pointed to an accelerating rate of expansion for our universe. Now, additional data from The John Hopkins University in Baltimore, via the Hubble Space Telescope, adds another layer of confirmation to this observation.
In this 1993 picture, NASA Space Shuttle astronauts install the WFPC2 camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. Besides taking pictures, the camera acts like eyeglasses to correct a flaw in the telescope’s mirror.
The astrophysical community is flummoxed by this new information, and many in the field believe that new physics will be necessary to explain these new findings. They might be interested in reading “The Enlightening,” where an accelerating expansion is a feature of the universe from our present perspective, as eloquently described by Merle Akeetheran. Fortunately, the accelerated expansion is just a portion of a cyclical process which eventually leads to continued acceleration and contraction, before repeating the cycle which includes a very rapid deceleration in its earliest stage.
Here is a link to an article referencing the latest observational data.
https://www.space.com/universe-expanding-fast-new-physics.html