Time Dilation vs Percieved age of Universe

In summary, the horizon represents the limit from which light has been received, and as the universe expands, the horizon will keep getting larger.
  • #1
Mordred
2,090
106
I've pondered a hypothetical problem

Take as time perspective "A" as being relative time dilation of Earth
Time dilation "B" being half of "A" slower due to relativistic effects.

assuming both "A" and "B" were both formed at the same time say 5 billion years ago.

If you were to measure the age of the universe with "A" getting the result of 13.7 billion years.

would "B" see the age as 11.2 billion years ? or would "B" still measure the age of the universe at 13.7 Billion years?
 
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  • #3
The last line of the FAQ is good us amateurs:

For one fairly natural definition of velocity, there are galaxies we observe that are now and always have been receding from us at a velocity greater than c.


The rest of the FAQ may not translate so easily to the form of this posted question.

In fact, upon reading this question posed here more closely, I do not understand exactly what is being asked. But we can say is that if one observer is measuring duration relative to being at rest with respect to the CMBR, and another is moving with respect to the CMBR, they will get different cosmological measures...
 
  • #4
Naty1 said:
The last line of the FAQ is good us amateurs:


For one fairly natural definition of velocity, there are galaxies we observe that are now and always have been receding from us at a velocity greater than c.

I understand about galaxies that we observe that are NOW receding from us at a velocity greater that c, but "always have been" ?

If they have ALWAYS been receding from us at greater than c, how did any of their light ever reach us?
 
  • #5
phinds said:
If they have ALWAYS been receding from us at greater than c, how did any of their light ever reach us?
Sound from a supersonic jet can reach you, right? So the fact that the source is going away faster than the signal velocity does not imply that the signal won't reach us.

Suppose a hare chooses to send signals back to its den via tortoises. Each tortoise that the hare sends home will eventually make it even though the hare is going much faster than the tortoises.
 
  • #6
phinds...yes..that's a tricky one...Seems off target at first...
I did not understand until previous discussions in these forums:

A simple version: In the past when the cosmological expansion was decelerating, we could see more and more over time; but in the future it is accelerating, so we'll be able to see less and less...eventually we'll not be able to see anything except local stars.

A more complete answer:

"I have read in other threads when expansion is just greater than c, light for these objects can still reach us (i.e. I think that the object is just disappearing over the horizon due to expansion but after a period of time, the light from the object is moving forward through expanding space so that the amount of space in front (towards us) is reducing so that although it is expanding, eventually the light crosses the event horizon and thus eventually arrives. Is this that type of instance?"

Marcus:
"That is correct though not necessarily "just greater than c". The microwaves we see as the CMB was emitted from material that was 42 million light years away when emitted, a distance that was increasing by more than 65 light years per year when it was emitted; that material is now about 45 billion light years away and the space between us is currently expanding by only 3.3 light years per year. The redshift now is z=1089.
Marcus: Assuming that the standard cosmic model Lambda CDM is right… then in 100 billion years from now would-be cosmologists will be in a sad fix..."

This is described in:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0221v3.pdf

Look on page 4 for the bad news about the CMB its intensity will have gone down by 12 orders of magnitude and its wavelength will have stretched out to about 1 meter!
No longer "microwave" background and probably too feeble for anything to detect.

/////////////
I have been thinking and trying to understand this but have a difficulty. If the event horizon stands still (in relation to the expanding space), I can see how objects / galaxies move over the horizon and out of sight - this I understand. But if the horizon represents the limit from which light has been received, isn't this growing in size at the speed of light, and thus anything this side of the horizon now, will remain visible / inside the horizon indefinitely? If this is the case, nothing would disappear (over the horizon) and so everything would always be visible.

I appreciate that this is an obvious "flaw" and so I assume that the flaw is actually in my logic ... but I can't figure out where!

All help greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Noel.
Marcus:
You are talking about two different horizons, the cosmic event horizon (about 15 billion LY) and the so called Particle Horizon (about 45 billion LY).

the CEH is the distance to a galaxy which if you started for it TODAY at the speed of light you could never reach. Or if, TODAY, somebody sent you a signal, or a star blew up, we would never get the signal or see the flash, no matter how many billions of years we waited around for it.

the CEH distance is changing but only very slowly. it is approaching a limit where it will stabilize.

But the CEH is not the limit of the currently observable portion of the universe! That is growing rapidly as light comes in from more and more distant matter. It is called the Particle Horizon and it is the distance TODAY of the matter which emitted light or other radiation (a long time ago) which we are getting today.
So the PH is the distance of farthest matter we could in principle be seeing today.* The PH is the distance now of matter which we can see as it was earlier. It is 45-some billion LY.
[/QUOTE]
 
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  • #7
Ah ... right. I think I had actually gotten my head wrapped aound that some time back but had forgotten, and it's not (to me anyway) immediately obvious. Thanks.

Paul
 
  • #8
The problem I was having with the question was of this nature from perspective "A" 5 billion is the age of their planet and looking at planet "B" only 2.5 billion years had elapsed due to relative time view points. From the prespective of "B" 5 billion years is also the age of their planet however time looking at "A" time is moving faster. Light from various locales would arrive at both at the same time.
I had not realized there was a FAG on this should have looked. I was essentially wondering how "B" would compensate for its time dilation as its time runs slower than "A" and yet light would reach it at the same time as it would on "A". The Fag sort of helps on that

This type of problem can make head spins so I may be overthinking it and getting twisted around lol
 
  • #9
DaleSpam said:
Quote from #4: "If they [galaxies] have ALWAYS been receding from us at greater than c, how did any of their light ever reach us?"
Sound from a supersonic jet can reach you, right? So the fact that the source is going away faster than the signal velocity does not imply that the signal won't reach us.
A totally different scenario with totally different implications. Is the air through which the jet is flying moving at supersonic velocity wrt observer? An obvious answer.
Suppose a hare chooses to send signals back to its den via tortoises. Each tortoise that the hare sends home will eventually make it even though the hare is going much faster than the tortoises.
Again - totally different scenario. Is the ground the hare is running on moving at supersonic speed wrt den? Obvious answer. I have an admittedly very rudimentary grasp of cosmology in general, but believe the following to be true. The idea of distant recession owing to Hubble expansion assumes it is space that expands faster than c wrt local observer - hence also any distant objects co-moving within that space. On my reading anyway that implies emitted light from such a distant galaxy is and always will be beyond our own horizon - assuming Hubble expansion continues as it has. Things get worse, not better with passing time in that regard. Distant objects now just visible will redshift to invisibility in the future - recede beyond our horizon.
 
  • #10
I'm sure we have all seen the current measurement for the expansion rate in recent articles

74.2 ±3.6 kilometers/second/megaparsec

thought I would post that from sevral articles I've read
 
  • #11
Q-reeus:

On my reading anyway that implies emitted light from such a distant galaxy is and always will be beyond our own horizon - assuming Hubble expansion continues as it has.
You'll have to define '...as it has'...slowing as in the past or accelerating as recently and the future...You can verify the first few lines of my post #6 here [this one sure
is more precise]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_sphere#Hubble_limit_as_an_Event_Horizon

which says:

edit: add.."Objects at the Hubble limit have an average comoving speed of c relative to an observer on the Earth so that, in a universe with constant Hubble parameter, light emitted at the present time by objects outside the Hubble limit would never be seen by an observer on Earth. That is, Hubble limit would coincide with a cosmological event horizon (a boundary separating events visible at some time and those that are never visible[6])."

However, the Hubble parameter is not constant in various cosmological models[3] so that the Hubble limit does not, in general, coincide with a cosmological event horizon. For example in a decelerating Friedmann universe the Hubble sphere expands faster than the Universe and its boundary overtakes light emitted by receding galaxies so that light emitted at earlier times by objects outside the Hubble sphere still may eventually arrive inside the sphere and be seen by us.[3] Conversely, in an accelerating universe, the Hubble sphere expands more slowly than the Universe, and bodies move out of the Hubble sphere.[1]
 
  • #12
DaleSpam said:
Suppose a hare chooses to send signals back to its den via tortoises. Each tortoise that the hare sends home will eventually make it even though the hare is going much faster than the tortoises.

:smile:

Now I get it! :wink:
 
  • #13
phinds said:
Ah ... right. I think I had actually gotten my head wrapped aound that some time back but had forgotten, and it's not (to me anyway) immediately obvious. Thanks.

Paul

Think about the Doppler effect! What would be going on there?

The tortoise(s) still move at the same speed, but have less energy if I picture it right.
 
  • #14
Naty1 said:
Q-reeus: "On my reading anyway that implies emitted light from such a distant galaxy is and always will be beyond our own horizon - assuming Hubble expansion continues as it has."
You'll have to define '...as it has'...slowing as in the past or accelerating as recently and the future...
Fair point. I meant primarily just extrapolating assuming constant Hubble parameter. That would be a coasting cosmos scenario. Of course accelerating expansion as observed just exacerbates things as per your second Wiki quote. Your #6 did cover the ground pretty well and I must admit to only cursorily reading it. Anyway unless there is some weird definitions involved, it logically follows that if any two galaxies were always receding from each other faster than c, no light can have ever passed from one to the other - i.e. they were always beyond each other's horizon. Otherwise 'receding faster than c' becomes a meaningless phrase.
[EDIT: Evidently being able to see objects that are and have been receding faster than c gets down to Hubble 'constant' being anything but that when looked at over total BB universe time frame, as reading sect. 3.3 here makes evident. So ok depending on definitions used, one can after all make that statement I objected to.]
 
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  • #15
Q-reeus said:
Again - totally different scenario.
Woah! You mean that hares and tortoises aren't exactly the same as the FLRW metric in every way?

I wasn't addressing the FLRW metric or cosmology at all. I was addressing phinds' question about how you can receive a signal when the source is moving faster than the signal propagation speed. I believe that the analogies get at the heart of the question, and they were not intended to get at the heart of cosmology.
 
  • #16
DaleSpam said:
Woah! You mean that hares and tortoises aren't exactly the same as the FLRW metric in every way?

I wasn't addressing the FLRW metric or cosmology at all. I was addressing phinds' question about how you can receive a signal when the source is moving faster than the signal propagation speed. I believe that the analogies get at the heart of the question, and they were not intended to get at the heart of cosmology.
If you say so. Must have been me way off in thinking that context of phind's query was very much cosmology based - receding galaxies and stuff. Anyway I now appreciate a bit more the subtleties and pitfalls involved in such an inherently non-linear spacetime arena.
 
  • #17
Dalespam...

[Suppose a hare chooses to send signals back to its den via tortoises. Each tortoise that the hare sends home will eventually make it even though the hare is going much faster than the tortoises./QUOTE]

I wasn't addressing the FLRW metric or cosmology at all.

I was going to question the original post...I feel it misleading...but the clarification
makes things better.

I just hope the cosmological explanation in fact depends on a varying Hubble sphere expansion/acceleration rates. It was a while reading in these forums and reading some supplementary articles before it began to sink in...That Hubble 'constant' needs to be explained each time it is used here for non experts...that it is NOT a constant over cosmological times...
 

1. What is time dilation?

Time dilation is a concept in physics that describes the difference in the passage of time between two observers who are moving relative to each other at different speeds. This phenomenon is predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity and has been confirmed through various experiments.

2. How does time dilation affect the perceived age of the universe?

The theory of relativity states that time runs slower for objects in motion compared to those at rest. This means that the faster an object is moving, the slower time will pass for that object. As the universe is constantly expanding and objects within it are moving at different speeds, time dilation can affect the perceived age of the universe.

3. Can time dilation cause the universe to appear older or younger?

Time dilation can cause the perception of the age of the universe to differ from the actual age. For example, an object that is moving at a high speed may appear to have aged less than an object that is at rest, even if they were both formed at the same time. This can make the universe appear older or younger depending on the speed and motion of objects within it.

4. Is the perceived age of the universe affected by gravitational time dilation?

Yes, gravitational time dilation is another aspect of relativity that can affect the perceived age of the universe. According to this theory, time runs slower in areas with stronger gravitational fields. Therefore, objects near massive bodies such as black holes may appear to have aged less than those in areas with weaker gravitational fields, leading to a difference in perceived age of the universe.

5. How do scientists account for time dilation when determining the age of the universe?

When calculating the age of the universe, scientists take into account the effects of time dilation caused by the expansion of the universe and the gravitational influence of massive objects. They use precise measurements and calculations to adjust for these effects and determine the actual age of the universe. Without accounting for time dilation, the perceived age of the universe would not match up with the estimated age based on other evidence and theories.

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