Quasar ‘clocks’ show Universe was five times slower soon after the Big Bang
www.eurekalert.org
Quasars are the supermassive black holes at the centres of early galaxies. Scientists have unlocked their secrets to use them as ‘clocks’ to measure time near the beginning of the universe.

In the early universe time ran much slower compared to the current period. This was already known, but scientists have pushed this back to a billion years after the big bang, when time ran 5x slower compared to now.

    • @Vahenir
      1•1 year ago

      I don’t think it would change the age of the universe as measured from the inside since with slower time a year also ends up being longer. From an outside perspective it would be older though.

  • CegorachEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    to me that just makes no sense - I mean there’s probably some kind of math-evaluation that said so, but… uh…

    slower compared to what? It’s not like you can take a stopwatch and look how long a second feels.

    Time “now” isn’t fixed either - move closer to a black hole or just move faster and your time becomes slower - COMPARED TO THE REMAINING UNIVERSE.

    But you’ll only notice when you return and compare clocks. Back then, when everything was faster, there wasn’t something to compare to? So nothing was faster?

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      From the article:

      “If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second – but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag.”

      They are comparing to time now. If you assume a quasar expels stuff at the same rate through all time, then when you look far back in time you should see pulses coming from the distant stars at the same rate as now. Yes, that light took billions of years to get here but the pulsing rate should be the same.

      They found that it isn’t, it’s five times slower, which implies that time then must be five times slower than now.

  • occupancy
    1•1 year ago

    So 5 days would be 1 day. And 50 years would be 10 years. Fucking hell. Time seems like an inanimate illusion, but is infact so real and fascinating