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Sixty seconds in a minute; sixty minutes in an hour; twenty-four hours in a day; 365 days in a year (or 366 days in a leap year).
It’s a semi-logical system that is drilled into us while we are children, and few of us question it thereafter.
But in reality, time is relative – something you’ll have noticed as an adult when lamenting the fact that “there’s never enough time in a day” or “time passes so fast now”.
Remember when you were a kid, how long the wait for Christmas seemed?
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While our perceptions of time are relative, time itself is dictated by a vast many things – from our planet’s orbit around the sun, to the moon’s orbit around the Earth, and even the forces of gravity and motion.
In other words, while the measurement of time has been invented by humans – from sundials to clocks, to the smartwatch you’re constantly checking – time itself is a fundamental part of the universe that has existed since the Big Bang.
The most mind-blowing thing is that depending on where you are in the universe, time is different. Our knowledge of that dates back to Sir Isaac Newton.
And according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, since gravity affects time (clocks tick faster or slower depending on the forces upon them). Earth’s huge gravitational pull actually slows spacetime, so time passes faster in areas of weaker gravity – unless you are travelling fast through space, that is, since orbital speed has a signifiant effect on time as well.
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Sounds confusing? Well spare a thought for those working towards the orchestration of future human space inhabitation, since the ability to maintain contact with humans living on Mars (for example) will require deep understanding of Mars time, and the ability to synchronise time between the two planets.
That’s exactly the problem that scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been working on – and, as researcher Bijunath Patla explains in a statement, their recent success has been no easy feat:
“It’s good to know for the first time what is happening on Mars timewise. Nobody knew that before. It improves our knowledge of the theory itself, the theory of how clocks tick and relativity. The passage of time is fundamental to the theory of relativity: how you realize it, how you calculate it, and what influences it. These may seem like simple concepts, but they can be quite complicated to calculate.”
In their study (published recently in The Astronomical Journal), the researchers account for the quickening of clocks on Mars (every day, they would be 477 microseconds faster than on Earth) and the way that gravity from neighboring planets causes fluctuating time on the Red planet (up to 226 microseconds difference every day).
Add to that the fact that a day on Mars is 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth, and each year is a total of 687 days long, and you’ll begin to really see the problem.
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Ultimately, just like we account for differences in time zones between our own lives and the life of a friend living on another continent, when humans live on other planets we need a foolproof way to account for the differences in time between us.
To figure this out, the scientists selected a reference point on Mars and aligned this with the gravity on the planet, which is five times weaker than the gravity we experience on Earth, cross-referencing with the way in which other planets affect Mars’s gravity at different points in its orbit.
It was complicated, but necessary work, the team conclude. That’s because our communication between planets – everything from inane text messages to important navigational information – will need to be synchronised and accurate. With this information, that possibility is much closer to reality.
With this new framework in place, we are closer to living on another planet than ever before.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?