Science Shorties : Gravitational time dilation

What is Time dilation?

Ever seen the movie "Interstellar", how the protagonist in the movie ends up not growing older as he dives into a black hole whereas his daughter on earth becomes older than him?

To put simply Time dilation is the actual difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers situated at varying distances from a point in space.

Gravitational Time dilation explains that Gravity affects the passage of time in space. The closer you are to a large body like the Earth the slower time runs, thus time runs slower for someone on the surface of the earth compared to someone in orbit around the earth.

As the gravitational potential increases, the passage of time becomes slow and as the gravitaional potential decreases the passage of time becomes faster. To put it simply the farther away a clock is from a gravitational field, the faster runs time.

As explained in the previous post (Read it here) the GPS time pieces in the satellites orbiting above earth have a delay of 38 micro seconds per day which means the time runs slower on the satellite and the humans on it age slower than people on earth. This is a result of gravitational time dilation.

Gravitational Time dilation near a black hole :

Although not visible to the naked eye, This is how an artists imagination of black hole looks like.

Fun Fact : Don't ever consider jumping into a black hole, because no one will ever know if you reached it or not.

This is Einstien's field equation for gravitaional time dilation.

Consider the formula above, When an object with a mass reaches the edge of a black hole, time appears to stop for an oberver looking at you from a spaceship.
Thus you can never see someone/something fall into a black hole.

The part where it gets even stranger is once the person has fallen into the black hole (although you will never see him falling) as the value under the square root becomes negative so the answer will be an imaginary number and no one knows how to interpret an imaginary result to the real world. 

So the reality wierdly splits into two; For the outside observer you are dead, but from your point of view you are alive and enjoying the view while drifting towards the center of the black hole.

                                                                                                                                           - Vamsi K

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