Study demonstrates ‘time dilation’ in the early universe, showing how time then passed only about a fifth as quickly as it does today
Time is a slippery thing, as profound thinkers like physicist Albert Einstein and, well, fictional time traveller Dr. Who plainly understood. The latter, in a 2007 episode of the British sci-fi series, accurately described time as “wibbly wobbly.”
The researchers used observations involving the brightness of 190 quasars across the universe dating to about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang event that gave rise to the cosmos. They compared the brightness of these quasars at various wavelengths to that of quasars existing today, finding that certain fluctuations that occur in a particular amount of time today did so five times more slowly in the most ancient quasars.
It is not as if everything was in slow motion. If you could be transported back to that time, a second would still feel like a second to you. But from the perspective of a person today, a second back then would unfold in five seconds now. Scientists previously documented time dilation dating to roughly 7 billion years ago, based on observations of stellar explosions called supernovas. Already knowing the time it takes for today’s supernovas to brighten and fade, they studied these explosions in the past – those at great distances from Earth – and found that these events unfolded more slowly then from our time perspective.
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