Because of time dilation, Toy Buzz is about 0.015 seconds younger than he would have been without the trip into space. The National Air and Space Museum holds in its collection a Buzz Lightyear toy that flew aboard the ISS for 15 months in 2008 to 2009. That’s almost 5 miles every second! Astronauts returning to Earth after 6 months on the ISS will have aged slower than those on Earth, but only by about 0.005 seconds. These differences in time are incredibly small, and you won’t notice the occasional change in ageing rate, but what about astronauts zipping around Earth in space? Those aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. Once you return home, however, and fly from Los Angeles to Boston, you will age more slowly, due to the extra speed you gain by moving with Earth’s spin. If you fly from Boston to Los Angeles, you will age faster than people of the ground. Both effects of time dilation compete here, but gravitational time dilation is stronger, making your head actually older than your feet. So, as you stand on Earth, the top of your body travels a tiny bit faster than the bottom because of Earth’s spin, but your feet feel a stronger gravitational pull to the Earth when compared to your head. In 2010, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology used highly-accurate clocks to show that clocks will tick more slowly even at speeds as slow as 25 miles per hour and height differences as small as one foot. Time dilation is most noticeable and causes the biggest jumps in time at high speeds or in close proximity to a very strong gravitational field, but we all experience time dilation every day. Both types of time dilation have been shown in dizzying effects in movies and television for decades, where it offers a way to seemingly travel forward through time. If you were to approach a black hole, for example, with a very strong gravitational pull on the space around it, time would move more slowly the closer you got. Or, as Buzz explains, “The faster I fly, the further into the future I travel.”Īlbert Einstein, with his theories of special and general relativity published in 19, showed that time dilation can be caused by two things: differences in speed and differences in distance from a strong gravitational field. If, like Buzz, the person moving travels back to their original location, this can make it feel like they’ve traveled into the future. And the greater the difference in speed, the greater the difference in time. This real phenomenon causes time to pass slower for someone moving, relative to someone staying still. With every subsequent test flight, each achieving faster and faster speeds, Buzz returns to find more and more time has passed.īuzz eventually learns he has experienced something called time dilation. After his first flight, he returns and discovers that while it had only been a few minutes for him, everyone else on the planet had aged several years. Buzz, the courageous Space Ranger, volunteers to test the fuel.

They are marooned on a hostile planet 4.2 million lightyears from Earth and their only chance of escape is to develop a special fuel that will allow them to travel fast- very very fast. The new Disney Pixar film Lightyear is full of sentient robots, laser blades, and hyper-speed travel and there is plenty of cool science to go with all that fun fiction.Īt the start of the film, we join Buzz Lightyear and his crew on a journey.

Buzz soon mistakes a familiar face for his friend Alisha, but is told that it is in fact Izzy, the granddaughter of Alisha, meaning that Buzz will have more to contend with than first thought.Spoiler alert: This post discusses a major plot point in the 2022 Disney Pixar film Lightyear. Upon landing, Buzz's feline assistant Sox informs the intrepid adventurer that he has somehow ended up decades in the future. Most interestingly, the footage reveals that Buzz will journey across time as well as space. Complicating matters and threatening the mission is the arrival of Zurg, an imposing presence with an army of ruthless robots and a mysterious agenda. As Buzz tries to find a way back home through space and time, he’s joined by a group of ambitious recruits and his charming robot companion cat, Sox. The definitive origin story of Buzz Lightyear, the hero who inspired the toy, Lightyear follows the legendary Space Ranger after he’s marooned on a hostile planet 4.2 million light-years from Earth alongside his commander and their crew. Disney and Pixar’s latest trailer for Lightyear, reveals new details about the upcoming sci-fi action-adventure.

Journey to lightyear