2012-09-20, 11:29 AM
Satellite Wrote:Is this "13.7 billion" (in the light of new research take or give 2 bil years) somehow a way longer period of time in space because AFAIK time functions in some crazy ways in space? I haven't studied much of physics, so I would be glad if some of you science nerds you could explain this a bit more.
I'm going to assume you mean relativity. It's not so much as "in space" where time gets a bit weird, rather when you're moving really really fast. Even speeds as fast as 10% of the speed of light (30,000,000 m/s) barely cause time to get weird.
When something is moving at that sort of speed, you get what is called time dilation. This means that time actually passes at a "slower" rate for the object (well, generally it's only single particles that can get to these speeds for now). I mentioned 10% of the speed of light before, well, you can calculate how much time is affected by using
T= t/[sqrt(1-(v/c)^2)]
Where T is the time passing in what is called a "reference frame", say , a person standing on the earth, compared to the time, t passing for a particle moving at speed v, and c being the speed of light.
So if something moves at 10% of the speed of light, for every 1.005 seconds on earth, 1 second passes for the particle. Not that great right? But if particles move much closer to the speed of light (which does happen, in fact, intially after the big bang, everything was moving near the speed of light), lets say 99%. Then for every 7 seconds on the earth, only one passes for the particle.
We also know for sure this happens, because we can detect certain particles coming from astronomical events that release particles called muons, which have VERY short lifetimes (like, less than a billionth of a second), yet they arrive at the earth from outer space!