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The location of galaxies is thought to have been triggered by quantum fluctuations in the earliest moments of the universe that caused matter to be denser in so
by UltraSane 2y ago
The location of galaxies is thought to have been triggered by quantum fluctuations in the earliest moments of the universe that caused matter to be denser in some locations. But why would you expect galaxies to NOT be randomly oriented?
- jl6 2y agoI guess I shouldn’t have that expectation. Perhaps it’s because on Earth we see nearby objects aligning with each other because they have been shaped by similar forces, or because they influence each other. But perhaps galaxies don’t interact with each other enough to result in any kind of alignment.
- UltraSane 2y agoThe planets in our solar system all orbit on the same plane because they all formed from the same dust cloud that was rotating in the same plane.
- orra 2y agoIndeed. And to elaborate: the random collisions which flattened the solar system (or galaxy) over billions of years all conserved angular momentum. Minute Physics have a nice video on this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tmNXKqeUtJM https://youtube.com/watch?v=tmNXKqeUtJM
- prerok 2y agoNice video, thanks for sharing. And just to clarify to GP, the original dust was not in the same plane and the video explains why it ends up in the same plane.
- evanb 2y agoMolecules of nitrogen and oxygen both have a distinguished axis (along the bond), but because they're gaseous there's no reason to expect them to align throughout the atmosphere. So too with galaxies---which, from a cosmological perspective, are essentially infinitesimal dust.
- kryogen1c 2y ago> why would you expect galaxies to NOT be randomly oriented? Well that depends on what your intuition about randomness is, doesn't it? Flipping a coin is not random, but you can't tell me the answer before it happens. Similarly, galaxy orientation is not random, but predicting the world we perceive is perhaps not so easy.