- 4084 - UNIVERSE
TIME - ran slower in the beginning? Time moved '5 times slower' in the early
universe, a mind-bending black hole study reveals. This observation that the universe appears to
run slower in the past was made by scrutinizing the light emitted by gigantic
quasars.
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---------------
4086 - UNIVERSE
TIME - ran slower in the beginning?
-
- Astronomers have
peered back to the dawn of the universe to observe time ticking five times more
slowly in the early universe than it does now, finally proving a prediction
that Albert Einstein made more than a century ago.
-
- Researchers spotted
the extreme slow-motion effect in data taken from bright cosmic beacons known
as quasars dating to when the universe was just 1 billion years old, less than
one-tenth its current age.
-
- Looking back to a
time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing
to flow five times slower. 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.
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- The reason time
appears to move more slowly in the early universe, at least from the
perspective of observers in the present day, was first presented by Einstein in
his 1915 theory of general relativity. Because the universe is expanding at an
accelerating rate, light emitted from a distant source gets stretched, making
its wavelength longer and redder.
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- Even more crucially,
the time delay between light pulses is also stretched to five times the gap it
was originally, making time appear to dilate and run more slowly. Thanks to
Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of
time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding. This expansion of space means that our
observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time
flows today.
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- Black holes are
born from the collapse of giant stars and grow by gorging on gas, dust, stars
and other black holes. For some of these gluttonous space-time ruptures,
friction causes the material spiraling into their maws to heat up and emit
light that can be detected by telescopes,
turning the black holes into “active galactic nuclei” (AGN).
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- The most extreme
AGN are quasars supermassive black holes that are billions of times heavier
than the sun and shed their gaseous cocoons with light blasts trillions of
times more luminous than the brightest stars.
-
- Where supernovae
act like a single flash of light, making them easier to study, quasars are more
complex, like an ongoing firework display.
To discover the effect on time, the astronomers took two decades of data
from 190 quasars and analyzed the different wavelengths emitted to standardize
their regular flashes, thus transforming them into the tickings of cosmic
clocks.
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- Time dilation had
been observed in slow-motion supernovas at up to half the current age of the
universe, but rolling back this time window to just one-tenth of this age has
confirmed that the effect is present at all cosmic scales, and that it gets
more pronounced over greater distances.
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July 10, 2023 UNIVERSE TIME
- ran slower in the beginning? 4086
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Tuesday, July 11, 2023 ---------------------------------
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