Someone correct me if I'm mistaken but I don't think the implication is that time passed more slowly in some kind of absolute sense but that due to time-dilation effects we observe these rapidly receding quasars in slower time. And that if they in turn looked back at us, they would also see our portion of the universe in slower time. Of course whenever you look at anything you are looking at its past, so the effect is that the distant past everywhere appears to be moving slower.
But imagine the following: That 12 billion years ago some scientist built a briefcase-sized machine with a laser array with trillions of mirrors in a complex pattern. The laser is inside the machine and fires a regular one-second pattern into the bank of mirrors. From there the light just bounces around and around in the machine until it emerges out of an aperture. Because there are so many mirrors constructed in a complex pathway, it ends up taking 12 billion years for the light to emerge from the device. We come across the briefcase sitting in one of the craters on the Moon's south pole just as the pattern of light is emerging for the first time. (Let's pretend that whoever built the device included tech that would prevent the signal from attenuating.)
The question is, would the pattern still be at a one-second interval, or will it be slowed down? If I'm understanding this news item correctly, the pattern would be still at the original speed because it will not have experienced time-dilation effects relative to us on Earth like we see in distant quasars.
But imagine the following: That 12 billion years ago some scientist built a briefcase-sized machine with a laser array with trillions of mirrors in a complex pattern. The laser is inside the machine and fires a regular one-second pattern into the bank of mirrors. From there the light just bounces around and around in the machine until it emerges out of an aperture. Because there are so many mirrors constructed in a complex pathway, it ends up taking 12 billion years for the light to emerge from the device. We come across the briefcase sitting in one of the craters on the Moon's south pole just as the pattern of light is emerging for the first time. (Let's pretend that whoever built the device included tech that would prevent the signal from attenuating.) The question is, would the pattern still be at a one-second interval, or will it be slowed down? If I'm understanding this news item correctly, the pattern would be still at the original speed because it will not have experienced time-dilation effects relative to us on Earth like we see in distant quasars.