![]() ![]() “At the fringe, some people were starting to question whether or not quasars are truly cosmological, or whether cosmologists knew what they were doing,” Lewis says. Previous attempts to use quasars to clock time in the early universe failed, leading to questions both about how scientists were analyzing quasars and the validity of Einstein's predictions about time in the earlier universe. Lewis is the lead author of a new study published on July 3 in the journal Nature Astronomy that used distant quasars - incredibly luminous supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies - as clocks to measure the flow of time back to one billion years after the Big Bang brought the cosmos we know into being. “We've tested his predictions, and they've come up positive again.” “At its heart, this is yet again another ‘Einstein is right’ kind of story,” University of Sydney Cosmologist Geraint Lewis tells Inverse. And scientists just confirmed one of the weirdest forms of time dilation of all - that in the early universe, time moved five times slower than it does on Earth today. Wild as time dilation effects may be, they stem from the more than 100-year-old theories of Albert Einstein. Or travel deep enough into the gravity field of a massive object, such as the black hole in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, and those left in more typical gravity will age faster than you, their clocks spinning wildly while yours seemingly ticks away the seconds as usual. Fly fast enough to the speed of light, and your experience of time is slower than someone left behind on Earth, such that years can go by for them, while you experience just a few months. Time dilation: It’s a staple of science fiction, and whether you’re familiar with the term or not, you’ve probably encountered it in print or film. ![]()
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