Astronomers have looked back at the dawn of the universe to note that time passed five times more slowly in the early universe than it does now – finally proving Prediction made by Albert Einstein more than a century ago.
Researchers detected the effect of the slow, intense motion in data from bright cosmic beacons known as quasars dating back to when the universe was only a billion years old – less than a tenth of its current age. The researchers published their findings July 3 in the journal Nature natural astronomy.
“If we look back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see that time seems to flow five times slower,” said the lead author. Geraint LewisProfessor of Astrophysics at the University of Sydney. he said in a statement. “If you were out there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second — but from our location, more than 12 billion years in the future, that early time seems to be getting delayed.”
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The reason for time moving slowly in the early universe, at least from the perspective of observers today, appears to have been first provided by Einstein in his 1915 theory of general relativity. As the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, light from a distant source is expanding, making its wavelength longer and redder.
More importantly, the time delay between pulses of light is also extended to five times the gap it was originally, making time appear to stretch and run slower.
Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined, and since the dawn of time have been in a singularity the great explosionLewis said, “The universe was expanding. This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear much slower than the flow of time today. In this paper, we set that back about a billion years after the Big Bang.”
black holes They are born from the collapse of giant stars and grow by devouring gas, dust, stars and other black holes. For some of these voracious rips in space-time, friction causes the material billowing in their craters to heat up and emit light that can be detected by telescopes, turning the black holes into something called an active galactic nucleus (AGN).
The most active galactic nuclei are quasars – supermassive black holes that are billions of times heavier than the sun and release their gaseous cocoons with light bursting trillions of times brighter than the brightest stars. However, complex pulses of light are a difficult task to interpret, which means that until now astronomers have focused instead on the evolution of giant cosmic explosions, supernovae, to study the passage of time in the early universe.
“Where supernovae act like a single flash of light, which makes them easier to study, quasars are more complex, like a continuous fireworks display,” Lewis said. “What we’ve done is unravel this fireworks display, and show that quasars, too, can be used as standard time markers for the early universe.”
To discover the effect, astronomers took two decades of data from 190 quasars and analyzed the different wavelengths they emitted to unite their regular flashes, thus converting them into the ticking of cosmic clocks.
Previously, time dilation had been observed in slow supernovae at up to half the current age of the universe, but rolling back this time window to only a tenth of that lifetime confirmed that the effect is present at all cosmic scales — and that it becomes more pronounced at greater distances. It also provides a definitive refutation of previous quasar studies that did not see the effect.
“These previous studies have led people to ask whether quasars are truly cosmic objects, or even if the idea of expanding space is correct,” Lewis said. “With this new data and analyses, however, we’ve been able to find the elusive sign of quasars, and they behave exactly as Einstein’s relativity predicted.”
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