Time dilation how does it work

When the space travelers came back, will they be much younger or older relative to people who stayed on Earth? This is precisely the scenario outlined in the famous thought experiment the Twin Paradox : an astronaut with an identical twin at mission control makes a journey into space on a high-speed rocket and returns home to find that the twin has aged faster. Time is measured differently for the twin who moved through space and the twin who stayed on Earth.

The Hafele-Keating experiments proved as much, when two atomic clocks were flown on planes traveling in opposite directions. The relative motion actually had a measurable impact and created a time difference between the two clocks.

This has also been confirmed in other physics experiments e. The closer the clock is to the source of gravitation, the slower time passes; the farther away the clock is from gravity, the faster time will pass.

We can save the details of that explanation for a future Airlock. A new simulation shows that when the DART mission hits the target asteroid, it could send it spinning and wobbling in a dramatic way. This is explained due to the fact that the astronaut's twin is traveling at relativistic speeds and therefore his "clock" is slowed down.

Let's see how we can calculate the time "difference". The equation for calculating time dilation is as follows:. Now let's have a closer look at the equation and determine just what impact the speed of the object has on time dilation. So at relatively slow speeds our everyday speeds time dilation is not a factor and Newton's Laws are still applicable.

If you can hang on one second, I just have to slow down. About , kilometres per second. As I move faster away from you, my time according to you has to appear to slow down. On the same hand, your time will appear to slow down relative to me. So when you have a mass like Earth, it actually warps space and time.

As you get closer and closer to a black hole, your time will appear to slow down more and more and more. But you could actually do the same thing with gravity. If you had a black hole that was going out to another star or another galaxy, you could actually take your spaceship and orbit it very close to the black hole. And your time would seem to slow down. If you get more massive as you get closer to the speed of light, could you get so much mass that you turn into a black hole?