ironfrown

Hi Martin, I am not sure if my interpretation of my reading on the subject is right. However, in the decelerating model of the Universe, the Hubble volume indeed is expanding and so the photons outside its past boundary will eventually fall within the Hubble limit and be seen by us. In the accelerating model, this will not be the case and once the stars fall outside the Hubble limit they are gone forever. It may be worth noting that in the accelerating universe model the stars that we see today may 'now' be well outside the Hubble volume. Note also that I have quoted 'now' as this discussion does not explicitly take into consideration the observer and distant clocks. The original question is still interesting, i.e. what would be the observable effects if the Universe suddenly (i.e. roughly 14 billion years ago) stopped expanding. Also see the previous discussion by budcamp et al. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedBy the way, intuition tells me that apart from the blue shift of galaxies, any distant event observed in the contracting Universe would be seen as accelerated.