# Who first hypothesized that the universe is accelerating?

I couldn't find this answer anywhere. Before 1998, was there a notable physicist who conjectured that the universe is accelerating and perhaps even submitted some equations to support it (and the existence of dark energy). Such a hypothesis would likely have been rejected outright and fallen into oblivion, which is why I have to ask this question to get the answer. And I don't mean Einstein's cosmological constant since he was trying to make the universe static rather than accelerating. Someone who actually believed that the universe's expanding rate was increasing even before there was any evidence of it.

• Supernova brightness versus distance function looked to disagree with Hubble back in the late 90's: "The projects that studied them were called The Supernova Cosmology Project, the High-Z Supernova Search Team, and the Supernova Legacy Survey." curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/85-the-universe/supernovae/… Jan 15, 2017 at 16:14

The idea of $\Lambda$ as a form of "dark energy" that had the potential to cause an accelerating universe was already put forward as an idea by Lemaitre in the late 1920s and early 30s. The picture below shows the evolution of the scale factor for families of solutions and was apparently made by Lemaitre in 1927 (see this science history blog about Lemaitre). The upper 5 curves correspond to a universe that is accelerating today.