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It is my understanding that time essentially moves slower in higher gravitational fields relative to time on earth. Conversely, in lower gravitational fields, time passes faster relative to earth. Is there any data surrounding how much faster time is experienced in these lower gravitational field areas? Also, if we assume sentient life which has achieved intergalactic travel exists elsewhere in the universe, wouldn't it make sense they would have come from one of these lower gravitational fields? An extreme example being a field where time passes 2x as fast relative to earth, and therefore that civilization has had twice as long to figure it out?

Qmechanic
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    I'll let someone proficient in Mathjax give you a full answer, but the places where time flows faster than Earth are going to be the furthest away from gravitational wells such as planets, stars, galaxies - deep in intergalactic space. There's not much there to enable life to form, just very very thin gas and the occasional dust particle. No energy for life to metabolise even if it did. – Jiminy Cricket. Aug 23 '22 at 22:38

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Cosmological spacetimes aren't static or stationary, so they don't have well-defined gravitational potentials. The gravitational potential is what would measure gravitational time dilation, so really there isn't a universe-wide answer to this question.

On a smaller scale, you can approximate a certain part of the universe with a potential. So relative to the surface of the earth, the answer would be somewhere far away from the milky way and our local group of galaxies. The effect wouldn't be a factor of two, though. It would be quite a small effect.

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If you have a very strong charge to mass ratio time would run ever faster than in vacuum since

$$g_{tt}=1-\frac{r_s-Q^2}{r}$$

in the Reissner Nordström metric. A black hole can't be charged as much though without becoming a naked singularity, but non BH objects such as electrons or macroscopic objects without an event horizon can, so if you have a ratio of

$$Q^2>r_s$$

the time in the vicinity of such an object would run even faster than for a clock in vacuum. In the expanding homogenous universe where there isn't any true vacuum the comoving clocks would run fastest compared to ones with peculiar velocity.

Yukterez
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation

I could be mistaken, but I think the following is the calculation you want based on the above reference. There is no significant change of clock speed with respect to distance. Rather, the ratio between a time duration on Earth and the corresponding time at a great distance is:

$$\left(1-\frac{2GM}{rc^2}\right)^{1/2} = \left(1-\frac{r_s}{r}\right)^{1/2}$$

(See reference for notation)

Thus the distance clock time is only tiny bit larger than the clock time on earth.

RC_23
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Buzz
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