Universe Expansion Funnel

  • Released Tuesday, September 20, 2016

A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years. The far left depicts the earliest moment we can now probe, when a period of "inflation" produced a burst of exponential growth in the universe. (Size is depicted by the vertical extent of the grid in this graphic.) For the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity. More recently, the expansion has begun to speed up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to dominate the expansion of the universe.



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Release date

This page was originally published on Tuesday, September 20, 2016.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:48 PM EDT.


Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series: