Time appeared to move 5 times slower in the early days of the universe, scientists found

• A new study found that time appeared to move five times slower in the early days of the universe.
• Scientists used quasars — enormously bright supermassive black holes — to arrive at their findings.
• The study offers direct observations that support Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Scientists recently discovered that time appeared to move five times slower in the early days of the universe, CNN reported.

The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. But in its nascent stages — when it was about 1 billion years old — time appeared to move in slow motion compared to now, scientists concluded in a Nature Astronomy study published this week.

The researchers used quasars — supermassive black holes that feed on gas and are among the brightest known celestial objects — to arrive at their finding. Quasars "are crucial to understanding the early universe," one astronomer said in 2018.

Scientists working on the study observed 190 quasars over two decades to use them like clocks.

"Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower," Geraint Lewis, the study's lead author and a professor of astrophysics at the University of Sydney's School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy, said in a statement.

"If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second — but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag," he added.

Albert Einstein, in his general theory of relativity, predicted that we live in an expanding universe, where time was slower in its early years, and now the researchers in this study observed that.