Time passes very quickly, especially as we age, as “in the blink of an eye” you may find yourself transitioning from childhood to an adult with many responsibilities.
Scientists have not found the reason behind time passing so quickly, although there is a modern theory that may provide an explanation for this phenomenon.
According to Cindy Lustig, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, one reason for feeling like “time is flying” is that “as we grow older, we tend to live more structured lives centered around routine, fewer major historical events that we use to achieve our goals, or that We use it to define different periods of our life time.”
Lustig went on to say that we have fewer experiences to think about when we are children, and that's because they haven't been on this planet for long. To put it in perspective, a five-year-old has 20% of his life filled with experiences as he discovers the world around him in just one year.
On the other hand, the same amount of time represents only 2% of a 50-year-old's life, so he or she has few new experiences in that time.
Lustig explained that our brains combine similar days and weeks, making it seem as if everything blends together. Humans measure time by memorable events, and as we age, those elements are few and far between. This is why most people can remember something they did once rather than hundreds of times.
There is another theory that has emerged in the scientific community, revealed by Adrian Bejan of Duke University, which suggests that “time flies” as a result of brain aging.
Bijan released his research in 2019, which states that our perception of life experiences may deviate as we age, and that our brains require more time to process new mental images.
On the other hand, early in life, the brain can receive new information in "rapid fire," allowing it to process more in the same period, and making days seem to last much longer than they might later.
According to Bijan, physical changes in our nerves and neurons play a major role in our perception of time as we age. As the years pass, these structures become more complex and eventually break down, creating greater resistance to the electrical signals they receive.
According to this hypothesis, deterioration of these key neural features leads to a decreased rate at which we acquire and process new information.
Infants, for example, move their eyes more than adults because they process images at a faster rate, Bejan said. For older people, this means that fewer images are processed at the same time, making experiences seem to happen more quickly.
Satellites monitor the "Ring of Fire" in seconds from space
Satellites observed the annular eclipse over the Americas last Saturday, October 14, from space.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) GOES-East and GOES-West satellites viewed the eclipse during which the moon obscured the center of the sun, causing it to appear as a glowing ring of fire in the sky.
Instead of the annular eclipse appearing as a fiery golden ring, NOAA satellites saw a dark shadow sweeping across the Earth's surface. The shadow was caused by the Moon passing in front of the Sun as it moved along the path of the annular eclipse.
The annular eclipse began on Saturday over the state of Oregon at 16:13 GMT, before moving through the states of Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas. From there, the eclipse passed across the Gulf of Mexico into Mexico, then Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Brazil before the ring of fire disappeared from the Atlantic sky at sunset.
Individual views submitted by GOES-16 to X (formerly Twitter) were posted by the National Weather Service Atlanta.
During time-lapse shots showing the entire eclipse, the moon's shadow can be seen passing diagonally across the Earth from upper left to lower right.
GOES-18 also observed the annular eclipse as it passed over Earth, although from a different angle than GOES-16.
The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University published a GOES-West satellite view of the event's shadow on its account on X, showing the moon's shadow moving from the western United States to South America and around the tip of the Earth.
An eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun when the three are aligned. If the Moon is close to the Earth, the lunar disk will completely block the Sun in an event called a total eclipse. A partial solar eclipse occurs when only part of the lunar disk approaches the Sun.
An annular eclipse, such as the one that occurred last Saturday over the Americas, occurs when the moon is farthest from the Earth, which happens because the moon’s orbit around the Earth is oval and not circular, which means that there are times when it is closer to the planet and times it is farther away.
Due to its distance from the planet, the Moon is smaller and therefore cannot cover the entire disk of the Sun, and the famous “ring of fire” is created.
For many skywatchers, this annular eclipse was a preparation for the total solar eclipse that will be visible from the United States on April 8, 2024. During this event, which is the first total solar eclipse seen in the United States since 2017 and the last until 2044, it will obscure The moon is completely sun.
During this total eclipse, the path of the eclipse will extend from Mexico through Texas to the northeastern United States and into Canada.