A team of astronomers has managed to peer into the past by examining the light around the quasar. A quasar is a supermassive black hole, with an enormous brightness of light. It is located in the center of the galaxies.
Because even light cannot escape a quasar’s gravity, scientists can see light that is billions of years old. The universe came into existence approximately 14 billion years ago with the Big Bang.
But scientists can look back so far that they can see the universe a billion years after its creation. There they saw that time then moved five times slower than it does today.
“It’s like watching a slow-motion movie,” explains astronomer and research leader Geraint Lewis. “All the phenomena we see were five times slower when the universe was only a billion years old.”
Because the universe continues to expand, time passes more quickly. This was already mentioned a hundred years ago by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity. This is the first time astronomers have actually seen it.
