>>72368390>>72369125Sort of. The expansion of the universe is caused by negative pressure due to the existence of vacuum energy which is caused by zero-point fluctuations in the quantum field of empty space. According to General relativity, such energy is equivalent to mass and thus it interacts with the higgs field and exhibits micro gravitational influence. Over large enough distances, the negative pressure of this dark energy density, or cosmological constant, is so great that it overcomes the effects of gravity between objects and results in pushing them apart instead. However, because this is happening in every direction, you can essentially think of it as the creation of space between all objects which increases depending on their distance from each other.
In other words, things that are farther away from each other have more empty space between them and so that space creates more empty space in between them. That's what causes the acceleration, which is currently measured between 67.4 ± 0.5 (km/s)/Mpc and 73.24 ± 1.74 (km/s)/Mpc depending on which method is used to calculate it. Notice that the units are kilometers per second per mega parsec. Which is unusual because it's distance per second per distance. This is because for every mega parsec of distance between two objects, that much distance is created between the two objects every second.
You might also notice that those two value ranges don't overlap. That discrepancy between the two measurements is actually a really big deal in cosmology right now and it's extremely interesting because it shows there's a problem with our understanding of the CMB, stellar models. or a more fundamental flaw with our understanding of physics.
Also, Quantum field theory suggests that the amount of energy of the vacuum should be larger than the observed value by an order of magnitude of 50 to 120. That's 10 followed by 50 to 120 zeros. Despite QFT being one of our most successful physical models with countless proven predictions, this error between the calculated and observed value is so great that it's been called the Vacuum Catastrophe in cosmological science. The last time this happened in physics was the Ultraviolet Catastrophe, which led to the entire discovery of quantum physics.
