Whether you’re waiting for a bus or bored at work, there are days when time seems to go painfully slow.

Now, a study has revealed that time actually moved more slowly in the early stages of the universe.

Using observations of a formidable class of black holes called quasars, scientists have demonstrated a process called “time dilation” that took place shortly after the Big Bang, the Daily Mail reports.

At that time—about 12.3 billion years ago—the speed of time was only about one-fifth of what it is today.

Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney, who led the study, said: “We don’t really understand time and its confinement, and some things are still not out of the question: time travel, web travel, etc. The future might be very exciting, though maybe not.”

Quasars – among the brightest objects in the universe – were used as “clocks” in the study to measure time in the cosmic past.

Quasars are extremely active supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of our sun, usually residing in the centers of galaxies.

They gobble up matter attracted to them by their massive gravitational pull and release torrents of radiation, including jets of high-energy particles, while a glowing disk of matter orbits around them.

The researchers used observations of the luminosity of 190 quasars across the universe dating back about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

They compared the brightness of these quasars at various wavelengths with that of quasars that exist today, finding that certain fluctuations that occur at a certain time interval today occurred five times more slowly in the oldest quasars.

Einstein, in his theory of relativity, showed that time and space are interconnected and that the universe has been expanding in all directions since the Big Bang.

Professor Lewis said this continued expansion explains how time moved more slowly earlier in the universe’s history than it does today. “It’s not like everything was in slow motion – if you could go back in time, a second would still be a second to you.”

But from a person’s perspective today, one second then would count as five seconds now.
By looking at distant objects, scientists look back in time by analyzing the time it takes for light to travel through space.

Scientists had previously documented time dilation dating back about seven billion years, based on observations of stellar explosions called supernovae.

Already knowing the time it takes for today’s supernovae to brighten and fade, they studied these explosions in the past—those at great distances from Earth—and found that these events unfolded in slower motion than we perceive in our time.

The explosion of individual stars cannot be seen beyond a certain distance, limiting their use in studying the early universe.

However, quasars are so bright that they can be observed from the infant stages of the universe.