Gravitational Time Dilation: Observing Planet Life

Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
2 replies · 1K views
Ohannesy
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Hello , my question is : If we could observe a planet life so far away from the Earth with so much gravity that it makes time pass more slowly on that planet , what would we see? Like what can we say about motions of lifeforms living on that planet? Would they be moving in slow-motion in the image we receive?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Ohannesy said:
Would they be moving in slow-motion in the image we receive?
We wouldn't really know how fast they actually move (without doing some calculations), but the processes we do know from Earth, would look slower.
 
Last edited:
Under different gravitation, the lifeforms are expected to be different...but if human beings could live there and move
as they did on earth, then yes. In another word, the proper time interval on that planet corresponds to a longer proper time interval on Earth (or distant coordinate time interval, if the field of the Earth is insignificant). (E.g. in the Schwarzschild metric, it would be reduced by factor of sqrt(1-GM/c^2r), though r is not exactly radial distanc)