[Physics] Voyager local time dilation (caused by gravity)

general-relativitygravityspacetime

Voyager I, as an example, taking account gravity
and setting aside effects of speed as cause of time dilation.

If it is very far away from earth and sun,
so then there must be a difference in the spacetime curvature there
in the ship compared with here in earth,
It means a detectable difference between our local clocks and its onboard clocks.

Imagine a signal transmision was designed to be at 1 byte for second
at local Voyager clock

Should we receive it at higher and higher rates ?

( because of solar system gravity decrease as it(Voyager) moves away and it will keep decreasing while it doesn't reach a middle point between another massive object)

Or the middle Voyager-Earth light path would compensate the effect, making the high rates generation from low curvature zones being delayed enough for us to receive it at same rate that it was generated?

Best Answer

There is in principle a "gravitational blueshift" for signals traveling from Voyager to us. The data rate we receive will be higher than the data rate transmitted by a factor $(1+\Delta\Phi/c^2)$, where $\Delta\Phi$ is the difference in Newtonian gravitational potential between the locations.

(Of course, this formula is only valid in weak gravitational fields, where it makes sense to talk in terms of Newtonian gravitational potentials.)

If I'm not mistaken, $\Delta\Phi/c^2\approx 10^{-8}$ for this sort of system, so the shift is quite small in practice. In particular, it's much smaller than than the ordinary Doppler effect due to the fact that both Voyager and Earth are moving. A motion at a speed of just 3 m/s would cause a Doppler shift as large as this gravitational shift, and both bodies are moving much faster than that.