Wild astronomical discovery confirms Einstein was right about time itself

Quasars show evidence that time was slower in the early universe.

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. 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.

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.

Wild as time dilation effects may be, they stem from the more than 100-year-old theories of Albert Einstein. 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.

“At its heart, this is yet again another ‘Einstein is right’ kind of story,” University of Sydney Cosmologist Geraint Lewis tells Inverse. “We've tested his predictions, and they've come up positive again.”

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. 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.

“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. But the new findings give cosmologists “further confidence that the mathematical framework in which we use to understand to describe and predict what's going on the universe is actually an accurate description of what's going on.” FULL STORY from Inverse