The images to the right show two views of spacetime diagrams that show the large-scale geometry of the universe according to the ΛCDM cosmological model. Two of the dimensions of space are omitted, leaving one dimension of space (the dimension that grows as the cone gets larger) and one of time (the dimension that proceeds "up" the cone's surface). The narrow circular end of the diagram corresponds to a cosmological time of 700 million years after the Big Bang, while the wide end is a cosmological time of 18 billion years, where one can see the beginning of the accelerating expansion as a splaying outward of the spacetime, a feature that eventually dominates in this model. The purple grid lines mark cosmological time at intervals of one billion years from the Big Bang. The cyan grid lines mark comoving distance at intervals of one billion light-years in the present era (less in the past and more in the future). The circular curling of the surface is an artifact of the embedding with no physical significance and is done for illustrative purposes; a flat universe does not curl back onto itself. (A similar effect can be seen in the tubular shape of the pseudosphere.)