20 ms·
James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise
- wwarner 2y agoA sample size of 263 galaxies isn’t enough to draw any conclusion.
- rambojohnson 2y agogot it.
- bilsbie 2y agoMaybe anti matter galaxies would spin the other way
- rezmason 2y agoShouldn't the galaxies in the northern and southern hemispheres spiral in opposite directions? /s
- wojo1206 2y agoUS left-handed presidents are also over-represented. This is another reason to feel special in our neighborhood.
- GuinansEyebrows 2y agoCorrection: Oops, The Telescope Was Just Spinning Counter-Clockwise, Our Bad
- martini333 2y agoMy clock also runs clockwise, when seen from one of two sides...
- jiggawatts 2y agoThey analysed only a small patch of sky, which could have a local relative rotation compared to our region of space. Real science will be when they survey the entire sky, with many small deep-field images.
- wokewombat 2y agoisn’t counterclockwise same as clockwise whe viewed from the other side?
- nabla9 2y ago> The same solo author (a computer scientist) has made many similar claims based on a variety of datasets. Often coming to completely contradictory conclusions. Some of these claims have been followed up by astronomers, who found errors in his analysis and poor statistical tests. His claims have been discussed in this sub before. Independent studied have found no significant evidence of anisotropy. https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/534/2/1553/7762193 https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/534/2/1553/7762193 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021ApJ...907..123I/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021ApJ...907..123I/abstra... https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017MNRAS.466.3928H/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017MNRAS.466.3928H/abstra... >Take his claims about JWST as an example. In 2024 he wrote a paper about some early data, claiming to find more galaxies rotating with the Milky Way. He claimed based on a sample of just 34 galaxies that the signal was significant. Now he has looked at a wider dataset of the same area, which should allow him to verify his analysis. But it shows exactly the opposite, more anti. So he writes a paper saying this new result is definitely significant but doesn't reflect on the fact he has written two papers which contradict each other. He has failed to reproduce his own result. The take away is that his results are not as significant as he claims. He's also looking at a tiny area, and nearby galaxies can have correlated spins. He doesn't take this into account either. There are multiple JWST fields in different directions he could examine in different directions to test his claims, there are two JADES fields, but he only publishes one. >I do wish the MNRAS editors would take measures to stop publishing low quality claims like this without more robust review. If you look at the text, it’s largely repeating results from his old papers. There’s very little discussion of the new results. source: https://www.reddit.com/r/cosmology/comments/1ja9i53/the_distribution_of_galaxy_rotation_in_jwst/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cosmology/comments/1ja9i53/the_dist...
- iainmerrick 2y agoThank you. That's a shame, it was a cool-sounding story, just unlikely enough to sound plausible.
- datavirtue 2y agoClockwise? To which observer?
- smath 2y agoSeveral folks here have recognized that the spin direction depends on whether you look at the plane of the galaxy from ‘above’ or ‘below’. One thing I didn’t see in the article is how the two types of galaxies are distributed across the 3D spherical coordinates when viewed from the earth (or rather from the JWST). Im thinking: what if there are a bunch of massive objects like black holes in certain directions that are causing the light to bend in a certain way. So what would normally be light coming from the top of the galaxy plane, is actually light reaching us from the bottom of that plane. Would this slew the distribution of the spin one way - I don’t know.
- mbac32768 2y agoShould we expect the big bang to have been completely symmetrical? If not, wouldn't most galaxies spin one way versus the other?
- atkailash 2y ago[dead]
- _kst_ 2y agoThe study is based on 263 galaxies. It should be fairly easy to determine the rotation direction of any (spiral) galaxy we can see, based on reasonable assumptions about the relationship between rotation and the configuration of the spiral arms. There should be thousands or millions of visible galaxies for which this could be determined (out of the estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe). Perhaps I'm missing something, but why bother reporting a result from such a tiny sample? It should also be possible to derive more detailed information that just clockwise vs. counter-clockwise. The rotation of a galaxy defines a direction (the galaxy's rotational north pole) and a point on the surface of an imaginary sphere. This could be determined by the galaxy's apparent rotational direction, its orientation, and its position in the sky. It would be interesting to see a plot of those points. In principle, they should be random. (If the points spell out "Go stick your head in a pig", I'll be very sorry that Douglas Adams didn't live to see it.)
- herdrick 2y agoCandidate for hardest collective fall for an April Fool's Day joke in Hacker News history?
- nottorp 2y agoSo do the galaxies rotate clockwise, or did we make clocks that rotate in the direction the galaxies choose? :)
- raattgift 2y agoSundials are really really cool, and the shadow sweeps in the clockwise direction at mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial#In_the_Southern_Hemisphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial#In_the_Southern_Hemisp... So "clockwise" is because the Earth's axis of rotation about itself is not too far from perpendicular to its orbital plane of rotation around the sun, and because the Earth rotates counter-clockwise from the perspective of someone hovering above the planet's north pole. This is the right-hand rule. Earth's axis of rotation (and orbital plane) is fairly well aligned with most of the round bodies in the solar system, except notably for oddball tilted Uranus and anti-aligned Venus (and the pretty different orbital planes of the minor planets like Pluto and Eris). The sun's north pole (following the right-hand rule) and south pole do not point to anywhere particular in the galaxy, and its axis of rotation is highly tilted with respect to the axis through the central bulge of the Milky Way. A nice diagram that seems to have originated from the European Southern Observatory: <https://www.physicsforums.com/attachments/motion-of-earth-and-sun-around-milky-way-eso-12oct2016-jpg.195544/ https://www.physicsforums.com/attachments/motion-of-earth-an...> Most disc-like structures we've found tend to be randomly oriented compared to each respective host galaxy's polar axis. For spiral galaxy rotations we have much better data from mostly edge-on views because we can measure the doppler shifts of molecular clouds at their margins; the advancing side will be less red-shifted than the trailing side. Spectral lines also broaden with the magnitude of rotation. AFAIK there is nothing at all unexpected about the distribution of trailing vs leading edges on our sky; the mystery is in the magnitude of the rotation of these outer gas clouds compared to things like their galaxy's apparent optical brightness or other markers of mass. Also fun is that for elliptical galaxies, these gas clouds don't rotate around the equatorial bulge of those that have them. They instead tend to move mostly radially deeper and shallower within their host galaxy. So if galaxies don't choose the rotation of their internal components like star systems or radio-loud objects like pulsars and relativistic-jet-equipped black holes, why (accepting for the sake of this argument that this garbage paper is correct about there being a bias in face-on spiral galaxies) would a distant galaxy affect us more than our own?
- perihelions 2y agoAlso https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43372271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43372271 ("Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This JWS Telescope discovery (space.com)", 56 comments)
- d--b 2y ago> This preferred direction of spin might be due to one of two reasons: either our entire universe exists in a black hole, or astronomers have been measuring the universe’s expansion incorrectly This is the subtitle of the article. It’s such a great summary!
- 0xEF 2y agoI'm not well versed in celestial mechanics, but I see a lot of "we're in a black hole" comments so far, and I'm super curious as to whether or not we know why black holes prefer a direction of spin. Can you (or anyone, really) shed light on that?
- exe34 2y agoI think it would be more that the entire universe is in a black hole spinning in a certain direction.
- kingsleyopara 2y agoExactly and anything new entering the spinning black hole is likely to inherit its spin.
- iainmerrick 2y agoIt's not that black holes prefer a direction, it's just that they have a direction at all. It's one of the very few observable properties of a black hole. If I'm following correctly, the "we're inside a black hole" idea is a major reach, connecting at least two unrelated concepts (black holes could contain baby universes; black holes have spin). But it's a really interesting idea and not obviously wrong.
- f1shy 2y agoIs inside the article: "A preferred axis in our universe, inherited by the axis of rotation of its parent black hole, might have influenced the rotation dynamics of galaxies, creating the observed clockwise-counterclockwise asymmetry,” Nikodem Poplawski
- 2y ago
- alenrozac 2y agoAt this point I'm open to believing our Universe is in a black-hole-like structure.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bustling-noose 2y agoNow if only we could see inside a black hole.
- snitty 2y agoIf we were on the other side of those galaxies, wouldn't they look like they were spinning counter-clockwise? Or are they measuring spin some other way?
- scribu 2y agoThe point is that you’d expect a roughly even distribution of clockwise and counterclockwise spins, not all of them to rotate in the same direction.
- throwawaymaths 2y agowouldn't it be the case that you would see almost exactly 50/50 if all galaxies had parallel axes and rotated in the same absolute direction?
- 1oooqooq 2y agowhy? if you subscribe to big bang then all matter got the same "initial kick". would be easier to assume same spin?
- aurareturn 2y agoSo what caused the "initial kick" to favor one side?
- mnky9800n 2y ago
- keyle 2y agoPotentially a very dumb question, but seeing the difference between cyclones and hurricane on earth (clock-wise, anti-clock-wise)... Does it mean that we are, potentially, on one of two poles(?) of the observable universe, if we're observing most galaxies around us rotating a certain way?
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoWhich also implies the universe, or our section of it, is rotating. Which raises the question: where did that angular momentum come from?
- twojacobtwo 2y agoNon-expert here, but I think any imperfect mass distribution with any attractive force would lead to a rotation. Which would mean, essentially, as soon as any imbalance happened in the early universe, some rotation was inevitable.
- vonneumannstan 2y agoThe same place the rest of the universe came from. A slight imbalance in the Matter-Antimatter distribution in the early universe
- thebeardisred 2y agoThanks for asking my question 8 hours in advance and allowing me to revel in the answers! :tada:
- peterburkimsher 2y agoWe're in the centre of the observable universe. The observable universe is the only true sphere. The observable universe is expanding into the unobservable universe. What would be interesting is to run a diff on the cosmic microwave background and the pictures from the James Webb space telescope to figure out where the true centre of the universe is, and derive the poles from there.
- 2y ago
- DonHopkins 2y agoUnless you're looking at them from the other side, in which case they rotate counter-clockwise! Or maybe they're just billboard sprites, always facing the camera, with clockwise animations.
- misja111 2y agoEverybody here is talking about the black hole hypothesis, but to me it seems that the other explanation, a wrong assumption about the rotation of our own galaxy, is more likely: because it could explain 2 other problems as well. > "The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself.”
- perihelions 2y agoI don't understand how the 1e-16 Hz rotation of the Milky Way affects how we perceive other spiral galaxies' orientations.
- scythe 2y ago>Due to an effect called the Doppler shift, astronomers expect galaxies rotating opposite to the Milky Way’s motion to appear brighter, which could explain their overrepresentation in telescopic surveys. I found this a little surprising as well
- perihelions 2y ago- "Doppler shift, astronomers expect galaxies rotating opposite to the Milky Way’s motion to appear brighter" But how does that work?
- z33k 2y agoI'm not an astronomer, but my intuition is this: When the source of the light is moving towards the observer, each successive photon emission happens from a position closer to the observer than the previous photon. Hence, from the observer's perspective, the time between photons is reduced, meaning more photons are observed in a given time, and the brightness is increased. When we observe a galaxy that is rotating opposite to us, not only is the source of the light moving closer to us, but we are also moving closer to it.
- dodslaser 2y agoDid they also check in the northern hemisphere of the observable universe?
- worldsayshi 2y agoClockwise relative to what? Does the universe have an "upwards" direction? Or is it just relative to all the other galaxies?
- andrewaylett 2y agoClockwise relative to our viewpoint, while we would expect that we'd see an equal number rotating in either direction no matter which way we looked or where we were looking from.
- xeornet 2y agoSorry if it's a dumb question, by why would we expect an equal number? Doesn't that assume that we consider ourselves at the centre of our observable universe?
- schoen 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle It seems to have caught on, but one could still doubt its applicability to all phenomena at all scales.
- andrewaylett 2y agoIf the orientation of galaxies is totally random, we would expect no bias in orientation. If you look at an arbitrary galaxy that's face on to us, it could be rotating either way. And we had no reason to set our prior at anything other than 0.5: why would one direction be more common than the other? But we observe a bias. Now, that could just be chance — but it's more likely that we've missed something somewhere so our assumption was wrong. One specific possibility is that the universe has an intrinsic spin, which might be because (per the article) we're inside the event horizon of a black hole which is spinning. Also, yes: we are at the centre of our observable universe.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoHow does that follow? I imagine there was already a preferred spin of gases immediately after the big bang, just due to random chance, so why wouldn’t that be preserved more or less?
- zurfer 2y agoComplete layman's question: If we would indeed be inside a black hole wouldn't we be able to observe new energy and matter entering? Related question: the horizon of a black hole is expanding when the mass increases. Could this map to the expansion of our universe, which seems to expand faster and faster?
- jagged-chisel 2y agoI don’t think we know enough about relative time from outside our universe. Our 15 billion years could be the parent universe’s one second.
- thro1 2y agoWhat about black hole new mass/energy converting into orthogonal space ??? ( ..is it part of Principia Unitas ??).
- floxy 2y ago>If we would indeed be inside a black hole wouldn't we be able to observe new energy and matter entering? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy
- DrNosferatu 2y agoWait - even if seen from the opposite side?
- like_any_other 2y ago> Due to an effect called the Doppler shift, astronomers expect galaxies rotating opposite to the Milky Way’s motion to appear brighter How does this work? The page it links to doesn't explain why rotation would matter. Edit: To clarify - one side of the galaxy would be moving towards us, and one away from us, no matter which direction it spins in, so this should not affect the average brightness of the entire galaxy. The original paper (https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798?login=false https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798?logi...) links to a few papers discussing this, among them https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/15/6/1190 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/15/6/1190 It doesn't answer my question (or if it does, I didn't understand it), but it gives a magnitude for the expected effect on brightness - 0.6%. I do not think that would explain the 1:2 ratio of observed spin directions.
- ceejayoz 2y agoOne side is moving away from us, the other towards. This means their relative speeds are different, detectably so.
- perihelions 2y agoHow are you linking that effect to the spin orientation of the Milky Way galaxy? Where is the all-sky anisotropy coming from?
- anomaloustho 2y agoI went to give a similar answer and realized that - in the instance that the two galaxies are sideways facing each other and with the text saying “it gets brighter” not “one side gets brighter” - I’m not sure if this is the actual answer. I can’t figure out why the Doppler Shift would make the entire galaxy brighter. I assumed it would make the rotation side spinning towards us brighter. But also redshift the side spinning away.
- tomr_stargazer 2y agoI think this may be a subtle reference to what is usually called "relativistic beaming" or "Doppler beaming" [0], though I normally associate this effect with matter that is moving quite close to the speed of light. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_beaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_beaming
- andrewclunn 2y agoTime and time again, we are beginning to come to the realization that our entire observable universe is not the whole picture, and we are almost certainly seeing only a localized portion of a much larger and grander universe.
- over_bridge 2y agoSeems like we've got a few of these imbalances now where you'd expect 50:50 but instead it's skewed to one side where nature had a different idea Matter-antimatter ratio Left vs right handed molecules Now galaxy spin directions Maybe there are others I missed too
- yboris 2y agoCosmic Rays May Explain Life’s Bias for Right-Handed DNA "the rapid decay of pions is governed by the weak force — the only fundamental force with a known mirror asymmetry" https://www.quantamagazine.org/cosmic-rays-may-explain-lifes-bias-for-right-handed-dna-20200629/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/cosmic-rays-may-explain-lifes...
- anomaloustho 2y agoIsn’t there a different observation for why planets tend to orbit in the same direction in a solar system?
- deepsun 2y agoIt's easily provable that any matter rotating other way gets expelled or thrown to center (Sun). So majority wins.
- albertzeyer 2y agoFor the matter-antimatter ratio, you would not expect 50:50, or would you? Because 50:50 would be a highly unstable system? In any case, you would expect that unstable states would be highly unlikely, and it would converge into a stable state. I'm not sure about the other examples. But maybe it's a similar reason that it is not a 50:50 ratio?
- hhjinks 2y agoA 50/50 matter/anti-matter system could still house stable local pockets of mostly matter or anti-matter. The problem is, from what I understand, that the universe seems to have sprung into existence with way more matter than anti-matter, and we don't know why.
- seydor 2y agoDoes it need to be that the whole universe started with rotation, or that our visible part of the universe has a common ancestor?
- brador 2y agoThis to me indicates the primordial particle was spinning clockwise.
- lioeters 2y agoHow would you even define what is clockwise or not if there is no other particle as a reference? You can look at it from the other side and say it's spinning in the opposite direction. I think it's enough to say that it was spinning. There was an imbalance tending toward a direction.
- damnitbuilds 2y ago1. Are they really saying "Because we are in a universe with a preferred spin and black holes have spin, we must be inside a black hole?" Tenuous, no? 2. If we are inside a black hole, where is the singularity?
- mnky9800n 2y agoIf the universe is bounded by regions that are further away than the speed of light has time to reach us then that would be an ideal place to look for a singularity. unfortunately it is unmeasurable since so far the speed of light is a hard boundary for what we can measure.
- layer8 2y agoInside a black hole just means inside its event horizon. The singularity can still be arbitrarily far away from that horizon (if the black hole is correspondingly large). The volume enclosed by the event horizon may be larger than our cosmological horizon (i.e. how far the speed of light allows us to see, given the finite age of the universe.) And the singularity of a black hole isn’t “where”, it’s “when”. The singularity of a black hole is in the future of all particle trajectories inside the event horizon.
- floxy 2y ago> where is the singularity? Maybe black holes don't have a singularity: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00841 https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00841
- belter 2y agoThis study does not conclusively prove most galaxies rotate clockwise...Just has a somewhat strong observation of asymmetry. Other studies that the paper mentions, and criticizes, did not observe it. Study is at around 3σ (like 62 heads in 100 flips). It is more likely that future studies disprove it, and this is an issue with the methods, if I am of the betting type... :-)
- pushreply 2y agoSo, there is a visible order about this matter. That they are "rotating", instead of, for example, "Z-Pattern" movement. Amazing.
- vincnetas 2y agoBut rotation direction depends on the observer. If i see galaxy spinning clockwise, this means someone observing galaxy from behind it sees it rotating counter clockwise. So are we just located so in the universe that we see 2/3 spinning clockwise and another counter?
- Patient0 2y agoThe actual paper makes more sense: "the number of galaxies in that field that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way galaxy is ∼50 per cent higher than the number of galaxies that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way."
- floatrock 2y agoSo 1/3 MilkyWay-Wise, 2/3 Counter-MWW? Or is it? I hate these percent-relative word games things... - Let x = "num MWW" - then "num CMWW" = 1.5x ("50% higher than x") - x + 1.5x = 1 - x = 0.4 So 40% is MWW, 60% CMMW?
- wruza 2y agoCorrect, I guess. 40/100 x 1.5 = 60/100. For 1/3 and 2/3 it must have been 100% higher.
- permo-w 2y agothis is a hard one for me to instinctively understand spatially, so I’m imagining myself stood in a room with arrows pointing left and right. if I have 3 arrows facing left in front of me and behind me I have 3 arrows facing left -- from my perspective when I turn around -- then I step past one of the arrows and now I have 2 left facing on one side and then in front of me what was now a left arrow is a right arrow, so now there's 5 lefts and 1 right. so extrapolating that, the observation is possible, but it still doesn't explain the imbalance, does it? you would expect most places in the universe to have a roughly even distribution from any perspective, I think?
- 2y ago
- nwaf 2y ago[flagged]
- nwaf 2y ago[flagged]
- nwaf 2y ago[flagged]
- BubbleRings 2y agoI was disappointed that the article only once mentioned “from our perspective” in relation to the spin of galaxies. One of the most fascinating things that you first learn about when you try to understand relativity, is the fact that there is no “still” point in the entire universe. Out in space, the point in space one foot in front of your space suit’s helmet can be called still by you, but it is just as reasonable to call a rock racing by you at a million miles an hour the central still point, where all other motion in the universe can be measured against. Because there is no absolute still anywhere. And when you understand that, that’s when all these cool concepts can then be described, related to time changes that happen between two locations when the relative speed difference between the two objects or locations approaches the speed of light. (So you can return from your trip to Alpha Centuri and meet your great great grandson who is older than you.) And just like there is no still point in the universe, there is no up or down. So yes, it may be true that, IF you select a couple of arbitrary points in the universe to be up and down, THEN you can count how any galaxies spin left vs right. And it is way cool to find out that it doesn’t appear to be 50/50, and to wonder about why. But I think the article author did the readers a disservice by glossing over the “no up or down” fact.
- symmetricsaurus 2y agoThe result is only significant to 3.39 sigma. Pretty good chance this is just a random fluctuation that will go away if you look at more galaxies.
- BlackFly 2y agoThis was also my thought, since selection bias seemed like a good explanation as well. The survey only covers 220 square arcminutes out of a total of about 148 million. Interesting data point though, definitely seems like something that one should measure!
- kerkeslager 2y agoAnother potentially dumb question: what does it mean for a 3d body to rotate clockwise? Doesn't a clock, viewed from its back, turn counter-clockwise? So is this just from James Webb's perspective that they rotate clockwise?
- abecedarius 2y agoYeah, the headline is misleading for just that reason. But rotation in 3d does have an unambiguous orientation which we call right-handed or left-handed (the "right hand rule" if you're unfamiliar with this). I don't know which orientation our galaxy's rotation has, the article only says it's opposite the majority in this sample.
- CPLX 2y agoI was reading this and thinking, what if there’s no such thing as scale. Like, obviously there is in some sense, but what if there’s some kind of theory of relativity for scale as well, maybe scale is relative to gravity and gravity isn’t constant or something like that. So for example a universe as detailed as ours with sentient beings and all that could exist inside a quark, and we could in fact be living inside a proton or something, seen from someone else’s perspective. And it’s that level of detail, forever, in every direction. Or maybe not, anyways back to work.
- klysm 2y agoSo the universe is left handed?
- gwbas1c 2y agoI used to read a lot about the history of science as a kid. The one thing that stuck with me is how frequently things we believe to be true are disproven. This does not surprise me: > “If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,”
- singularity2001 2y agoapproximately 60% of the 263 galaxies examined were found to rotate clockwise, while about 40% rotated counterclockwise. The study’s results have a significance level of approximately 3.39 sigma, indicating a moderate chance that the findings could be due to random fluctuations
- wtcactus 2y agoThe linked article is written in an absurd way. Clockwise is not a fundamental measurement, it's relative to the viewer. What the original article explains, is that this is relative to our observer point of view (obviously). It's still very interesting, since, disregarding any potential interaction in our local group, randomness was expected and we should see around 50/50 rotating either way unless one of the explanations came into play.
- credit_guy 2y agoI wonder if it’s already April’s Fools Day in some parts of the world. The hands of a clock move clockwise if seen from the front, but counterclockwise if seen from the back.
- tiagod 2y agoThe article states that the problem is that they looked at random galaxies, 1/3 were moving one way and 2/3 the other. If the distribution was truly random, and the universe is isotropic, we should see roughly 50/50.
- coffeecantcode 2y agoComing from a place of complete ignorance, are there indicators in galaxies that determine a top/bottom for lack of better words? I can’t think of any that would make much sense as top/bottom would mean that there needs to be a relative universal point to reference and as far as I know, that doesn’t exist.
- gerad 2y agoOn the antipodal side of the universe they mostly rotate counterclockwise. ;-)
- mapt 2y agoFascinating. Did it require JWST to notice this, or did we just _not check_ until now? Is there a notable asymmetry in, say, the spin directions of galaxies contained in the Hubble XDF? EDIT: This doesn't make a lot of sense. Lior Shamir has written that a lot of unrelated sky surveys recently have shown an asymmetry in the past few years, but only down around ~2%. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/16/10/1389 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/16/10/1389 https://aas.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/lior_aas236.pdf https://aas.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/lior_aas236.pdf JWST's asymmetry in both early work and more recent deep fields is more than an order of magnitude stronger. EDIT2: Notably they show anisotropic asymmetry: The galaxies are different rotations when you look in different directions, with something like +6% in one direction and -5% in another. But still nothing like the +50% now being reported as a general feature.
- stainablesteel 2y agoso i guess the underlying assumption is that this looks out from out perspective in a single static orientation, because this says nothing to me about their orientation which i think is what they're trying to convey by saying clockwise? or i suppose this is clockwise/counterclockwise in regards to the direction they're moving in? 2/3 doesn't seem that significant if they think it should be a 50/50 split, we might just not be seeing enough
- lupusreal 2y agoIs this a robust finding? I heard something about this apparent discrepancy a week or so ago, and it was dismissed as probably just an artifact of dodgy classification and the paper's author was a bit of a kook, a computer scientist who was delving into cosmology to find evidence of the simulation hypothesis.
- tlogan 2y agoCould this be related that the weak force only interacts with left-handed particles (and right-handed antiparticles)?
- RobertRoberts 2y agoEverything turns clockwise from a specific perspective... that's what is interesting here, perspective and consistency.
- slicktux 2y agoCould an equivalent of the Coriolis Force be at play here?
- Mekaniko 2y agoDoes that mean we're in the northern or southern unisphere ?
- 1970-01-01 2y agoSpin a coin on top of a glass table. Observe it from the top, and it spins either clockwise or anticlockwise. Observe it from the bottom and it's the opposite. There are no tables in space. Objects tumble while rotating. It seems we are measuring rotations using a fixed perspective when there is no reason to do so https://www.comsol.com/blogs/why-do-tennis-rackets-tumble-the-dzhanibekov-effect-explained https://www.comsol.com/blogs/why-do-tennis-rackets-tumble-th...
- richwater 2y agoThe paper measures rotation relative to the Milky Way galaxy.
- hnuser123456 2y agoIf there were 10 pennies and 7 of them were spinning the same direction, you might say one direction appears to be favored. Spiral galaxies spin, they do not tumble unless hit by another galaxy. Elliptical galaxies are like gravitational convection and don't really have cohesive "rotation", however.
- metalman 2y agomust be something left out, because a galaxies r/l rotation is dependent on which side it is bieng viewed from, and since the are unlabled as to face and back, what is the basis for the handedness of something spinning in the void, with presumably most of the galaxies tilted at every angle and orientation possible other than aligned with ours. and 263* galaxies is zero galaxies when divided by the minimum number of galaxies, it's not a significant sample * number in study
- sivm 2y agoWe’re six black holes deep
- tagami 2y agoIf you look at the galaxy from the other side, wouldn’t it be counterclockwise?
- bigmadshoe 2y agoYes, but I think the interesting thing is that there are a greater number of galaxies spinning one way than another.
- soulofmischief 2y agoWhat if we're just upside down? :)
- geor9e 2y agoTIL the universe has a specific "up" direction to even call things counterclockwise. I guess I should have already known this from Star Trek's quadrants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_coordinate_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_coordinate_system
- 93po 2y agosorry if someone already asked this, but what is clockwise when there's no "up"? The earth axis is like 60 degrees off the axis of milky way, so it's not clear what the frame of reference is.
- pixl97 2y agoIn theory it doesn't matter what the frame of reference is. Instead of thinking of it like spin, think of it like heads or tails. Both are binary measures and frame of reference doesn't matter. For example if you're flipping a penny on a glass table and someone is looking from the bottom, they'll see the same ratio as you. In a fair universe you'd expect pretty much a 50/50 heads/tails clockwise/anti-clockwise outcome. But instead we something like 66/34 or 75/25. The actual direction of spin doesn't matter. The fact the measurement is unbalanced does.
- 93po 2y agoThat makes sense, but the article title says "clockwise". Why did they choose that word instead of "counter-clockwise"? They must be some threshold of "this 180 degrees is up and this other 180 degrees is down" for them to have chosen one word over the other.