Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-1-2026

Department

Department of Physics

Abstract

Matter dilates time in its surroundings, typically quantified by the Schwarzschild metric. Extrapolating, mass-energy in the universe creates a cumulative time dilation at the Earth, a dilation different from the commonly invoked (1+z) cosmological redshift. In Newtonian cosmology, it is shown that the diverging amount of distant mass-energy with distance causes a similarly diverging cumulative time dilation at the Earth. In several relativistic Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker cosmologies, the Newtonian gauge is used to estimate a conceptually similar cumulative time dilation by successively replacing mass-energy shells by voids and tallying the cumulative difference. As a function of redshift, it is found that this cumulative time dilation does not diverge in standard concordance cosmology, but as a function of comoving distance, it generally does diverge in several flat cosmologies.

Publisher's Statement

© The Author(s) 2026. Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-026-04645-6

Publication Title

Astrophysics and Space Science

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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