A cosmological metric can measure the interval in units of time rather than length. With dimensionless comoving spatial coordinates, its scale factor then has units of length and a comoving clock has . Proper spatial length is at constant cosmic time. This convention is equivalent to the more common length-valued interval , not a different cosmology.
The equation of state makes the cosmological continuity equation imply constant energy density . For , put . Solving both the Friedmann equation and Friedmann acceleration equation gives
Up to shifts of cosmic time and time reversal, the positive scale factors are for , for , and on for . They are the flat, closed and open slicings of de Sitter spacetime. The open zero is a coordinate boundary with finite Ricci scalar and finite Kretschmann scalar .
For the expanding flat branch, the cosmological event horizon has comoving radial distance and proper distance in cosmology . An event on the horizon reaches the central comoving observer only at infinite reception time; events beyond it never do.