• Question: is the time on other planets faster or slower than on earth?

    Asked by scazza226 to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 15 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Adam Tuff

      Adam Tuff answered on 14 Mar 2011:

      A tricky question! Time is, as Einstein put it, “relative!” this means it depends on where you are watching or looking at time from. Time will always appear normal to you no matter where you are, but to someone else watching you, it might appear different!

      Confused? It’s a confusing idea – but this is what Einstein’s theory of relativity is about. Depending on how fast you move, time moves faster or slower depending on where you watch it from! Say you took off in a space ship that could travel at half the speed of light, and i stayed on Earth. We both get stop watches, and I get a switch that I press to bring you back to earth. We both agree that you will go to space for one hour, and travel at half the speed of light around the planet, and then you’ll come home.

      I wait an hour, and press the button, but when you come back you ask me what is wrong because you have only been in space for 45 minutes. We are actually both right – my clock says 1 hour, yours says 45 minutes – it’s a strange effect, but it does actually happen!

      So, if you were on a very fast rotating planet, time wouldn’t be any different to you – but it would to others relative to you!

    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 14 Mar 2011:

      Time runs at the same rate! Days and years are different lengths but ‘time’ is the same.

    • Photo: Robert Simpson

      Robert Simpson answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Time pretty much runs at the same rate for all the planets. General relativity tells us that the passage of time is distorted by travelling near the speed of light, or by intense gravitational fields. If you lived on the surface of a neutron star (which is very, very dense and massive) then time would tick over much more slowly than for the people outside, living on a normal planet. You can’t live on a neutron star, obviously, but time does tick over differently in extreme environments.

    • Photo: Sheila Kanani

      Sheila Kanani answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Well techincally time runs at the same pace no matter where you are, because it is relative to you.
      Time also can get slower in areas of really strong gravity, like at a black hole.
      However, the gravity of the planets is all roughly the same, even though Jupiter is so big. So time runs roughly the same at all the planets. The lengths of the days and years etc. is different for each planet though. If you want to know more about days and years on other planets let us know!

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