ABOUT THIS EPISODE
If you overlook the fact that you’d be instantly vaporized, there’d be one small advantage to standing at the surface of the Sun: You’d age more slowly than your friends and family back on Earth.
The effect is called time dilation. It comes from Relativity – Albert Einstein’s theories of motion and gravity. They tell us that clocks at different locations tick at different rates. Keep in mind, though, that they tick at different rates as seen by observers moving at different speeds and in different gravitational fields.
According to Special Relativity, as you go faster your clock slows down. General Relativity says your clock slows down as the pull of gravity gets stronger.
On Earth, the effect has been confirmed by placing atomic clocks in high-flying jet aircraft. And GPS satellites are programmed to compensate for the effect. If they weren’t, the whole system would fail within days.
Time dilation is more pronounced at the surface of the Sun because of the Sun’s great mass. A clock there would slow down by about 67 seconds per year compared to one on Earth. And when the Sun expires, its “corpse” will have even stronger gravity, slowing a clock by more than an hour per year.
Time dilation is strongest just outside a black hole. An outside observer would see a clock at the cusp move almost infinitely slowly – never ticking off the final second before plunging into the black hole.
Script by Damond Benningfield
