16 ms·

Potentially 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,

by keyle 2y ago

Potentially 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 ago
Which also implies the universe, or our section of it, is rotating. Which raises the question: where did that angular momentum come from?
- twojacobtwo 2y ago
  Non-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 ago
  The same place the rest of the universe came from. A slight imbalance in the Matter-Antimatter distribution in the early universe
thebeardisred 2y ago
Thanks for asking my question 8 hours in advance and allowing me to revel in the answers! :tada:
peterburkimsher 2y ago
We'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.
- jenadine 2y ago
  > The observable universe is expanding into the unobservable universe. Is that so? My understanding is that it doesn't expend into something. And that it expend so fast that the edge of it becomes unobservable.
  - peterburkimsher 2y ago
    Space and time are related, and expanding rapidly since the Big Bang (though there was a time in the early universe when the expansion rate was faster). https://cds.cern.ch/images/CERN-HOMEWEB-PHO-2022-023-1 https://cds.cern.ch/images/CERN-HOMEWEB-PHO-2022-023-1 Observing the edge is effectively looking back in time, to see the conditions of the universe closer to the time of the Big Bang. New telescopes keep expanding that edge, and new particle colliders (such as those at CERN or Fermilab) keep "bashing 2 rocks together to make fire" - recreating the conditions of the Big Bang to see what comes off. What I'm not sure about is whether the speed of light (assumed to be constant) is correlated with the size of the observable universe. Perhaps a physicist could shed some light on that question. Relativity means that galaxies that are moving at the speed of light away from one another (one travelling at c, another travelling at -c) have a relative velocity of higher than the speed of light (|c| + |-c| = 2c). There's also the theory of the One Electron Universe, which I quite like (though that reveals my bias as an electronic systems engineer). Perhaps what we see is the One photon universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe Hopefully this rambling makes sense to someone!
    - ck2 2y ago
      Wait, I get space expanding and accelerating. I never considered time expanding (and accelerating?). Is that even possible? What does that imply?
      - peterburkimsher 2y ago
        Finding a way to reverse the expansion of the universe would imply time travel being possible. It hasn't happened yet, but perhaps that's just a technological limitation. And if you ask my Mac, then Time Machine is very much possible - that's just the name of the backup system. The question starts to become very philosophical if there is a backup system for this universe. Everything being saved, for eternity, in infinite time. It would require very advanced computational power and storage, but it would probably work in binary (but that's just the kind of thing a computer engineer would say). Maybe, though, the observable universe is rotating clockwise around a centre that is in the unobservable universe, and time is just a measure of how many rotations have been made since the Big Bang.
kmoser 2y ago
Dumber question: would a galaxy that appears to spin clockwise appear to spin counter-clockwise when viewed from the other side? Does this imply that the real question is why galaxies' relative orientations seem to favor more spinning in one direction than the other?
- smeej 2y ago
  This is exactly the dumb question I came here to ask. So now I wait with you for a less dumb person to reply. My clock certainly seems to tick in the opposite direction when I look at it from behind.
  - nuccy 2y ago
    Answering to your and original question above: there are no poles (or axes of rotation) in the Universe. On large scales (think distances to include thousands and millions of galaxies each with billions of stars with even more planets) the Universe is uniform - isotropic and homogeneous [1]. It is expanding with acceleration in all direction in each and every point of its space, so there is no preferred direction thus in average we should have 50% of clockwise and 50% of counter-clockwise galaxies since orientation of those should also be absolutely random in average, unless something when the Universe was being created or evolving affected that balance. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
    - smeej 2y ago
      So it makes about as much sense to ask why 2/3rds of the galaxies are "upside-down" from our vantage point, because there's no clear reason it should be something other than 50% in a sample size this large?
      - jfengel 2y ago
        Correct. On the largest scales it should be 50-50. If it's not that would add a significant term to the Big Bang that nobody had previously expected. It would be a rather big deal... if it holds up.
Gooblebrai 2y ago
Regardless of if this is the case, the idea certainly blew my mind
- alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  lol, I’m glad it wasn’t just me that thought “woah wait. wtf did you just say??!”
blackhaj7 2y ago
Wow, interesting thought
- xtiansimon 2y ago
  Universe of left-handed people.
fennecfoxy 2y ago
That would be super cool to find out! And then it also begs the question, is there something at the center that unites the two poles? If so then what is it! It would also imply that our whole universe is rotating - the only reason this happens on Earth is because of our planets rotation and the Coriolis effect.
- thunder-blue-3 2y ago
  I've been following this news for the past couple of weeks-- in essence your statement is what they are hypothesizing, and that the "something at the center that unites the two poles" might be that we are within a black hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology for the curious.
  - nashashmi 2y ago
    “The universe is an orb and that orb is rotating causing all the other stuff to spiral.” This was a long held theory of mine because I could not understand why a galaxy would spiral. I think there is a men in black scene, where an alien is rotating the universe globe like a toy they are playing.
    - rdtsc 2y ago
      > This was a long held theory of mine because I could not understand why a galaxy would spiral. I think in general it would be unusual if they didn’t rotate. Any large non-uniform mass of gas or rocks when colliding will induce some rotation. What is odd though is that for galaxies we see more of them spinning one way than another.
    - eightysixfour 2y ago
      Doesn’t it have to spiral? Think of the gravity well, anything not orbiting is just falling. The only things not racing towards the black hole at the center of the galaxy are the ones that are orbiting.
      - 2y ago
wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB 2y ago
Potentially a very good question!
tiffanyh 2y ago
My own dumb question … How does cyclones/hurricanes relate to being “on one of two ‘poles’”? Do you mean hemisphere?
- jeffdn 2y ago
  If all of the galaxies we see rotate the same way, are we “looking down” from a pole and seeing only those with the same rotation we have, as opposed to a more equatorial view that would be evenly split.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    But the universe isn’t spherical. I’m not sure I understand this hypothesis as explained.
    - pests 2y ago
      But the observable universe roughly is.
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        The observable universe is an illusory artifact of being an observer traveling at less than the speed of light. A constant distance in every direction is a sphere. That tells us nothing about the actual structure of the universe. In other words, your observable universe is different than mine and that's both spheres we're in the middle of. That suggests the universe itself probably isn't a sphere.
        SkyBelow 2y ago
        Is it an illusory artifact or is it all that exists? If it can't be observed, it can't be tested, it can't be verified in any way or ever interacted with, then isn't it just an instances of Russell's Teapot and thus does not exist? What does it mean for science if existence isn't a binary property or one that we set as a truth yet is entirely untestable?
permo-w 2y ago
maybe this is a stupid question, but is it possible that the big bang simply had some kind of clockwise angular momentum to it? how different is that idea from the black hole cosmology concept? I don't really understand how the two fit together
- Reubachi 2y ago
  I don't believe the current consensus is that motion from big bang imparted a spin on objects. Rather, that dark matter (mass) was "dropped" all over as a result of the bang, making gravitational hot spots. Millions of years of dark energy progression affects those hotspots, making a sort of ever expanding (yet perceptively slowing down) sink drain with water pouring into it.
- ziofill 2y ago
  It’s different because it’s simpler to assume that the total angular momentum of the universe is zero. If one black hole is rotating one way there must be other stuff rotating the other way to counterbalance. If you assume instead that the whole universe has angular momentum, well, where did that come from?
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    > If you assume instead that the whole universe has angular momentum, well, where did that come from Would that be same kind of question as “where did the Big Bang come from?”. That’s a lot of energy that came from somewhere as well seemingly for no good reason. I also wondered immediately about dark matter; could it be that’s where the counter-balance of momentum went? Like most galaxies spin one way and most dark matter would then have to spin the opposite way. I am not a physicist so this is all random guessing of course.
    - RandomBacon 2y ago
      > That’s a lot of energy that came from somewhere as well seemingly for no good reason. I never finished the book, but this reminds me of God's Debris by Scott Adams which explores a philosophy of pandeism (where God annihilated itself and became the universe).
eagerpace 2y ago
https://mapoftheuniverse.net https://mapoftheuniverse.net While we don't believe we're the center of the universe, I believe we're limited by instrumentation to determine its size. Best guess now is 100B LY in diameter.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  100B LY is a little bit larger than the observable universe. But the observable universe is a fraction of the whole thing. The "best guess" right now is that the total universe is flat and has no end. If it's bounded, 100B LY is orders of magnitude below the most conservative lower-bound estimates, which I believe start at around 300-500x that size. (With huge error bars on all sides.)
- cozyman 2y ago
  that's the neat part, it is though
analog31 2y ago
We're equidistant from the edge of the observable universe in all directions. One would think that puts us at the center. (But the same is true for someone sitting on another planet).
- ajross 2y ago
  Some of that is a semantic thing about how one defines "distant", but this is not really required by GR. In fact the insight behind the emerging "timescape" theories is that the universe isn't flat or homogenous on large scales and that different regions have expanded at different rates. Their "edges" are equally old, but may not be not equally "distant".
- adolph 2y ago
  > equidistant from the edge of the observable universe in all directions That seems like an example of "streetlight effect." The streetlight effect, or the drunkard's search principle, is a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
  - jordanb 2y ago
    It's not. Rather it's that every observer in the universe is at the center of their own light cone. The fact that we can not observe anything outside our light cone is well understood.
hnuser123456 2y ago
There is a dipole/toroidal universe theory: https://evolvingsouls.com/blog/toroidal-universe/ https://evolvingsouls.com/blog/toroidal-universe/ Pardon the cheesy domain name, the content is very relevant.
MichaelDickens 2y ago
IIRC the Virgo Supercluster is gravitationally bound. Pure speculation but my guess would be that galaxies are revolving around the center of the Virgo Supercluster and this creates the galaxy-level Coriolis effect.

by keyle 2y ago

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Which also implies the universe, or our section of it, is rotating. Which raises the question: where did that angular momentum come from?

twojacobtwo 2y ago
Non-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 ago
The same place the rest of the universe came from. A slight imbalance in the Matter-Antimatter distribution in the early universe

thebeardisred 2y ago

Thanks for asking my question 8 hours in advance and allowing me to revel in the answers! :tada:

peterburkimsher 2y ago

We'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.

jenadine 2y ago
> The observable universe is expanding into the unobservable universe. Is that so? My understanding is that it doesn't expend into something. And that it expend so fast that the edge of it becomes unobservable.
- peterburkimsher 2y ago
  Space and time are related, and expanding rapidly since the Big Bang (though there was a time in the early universe when the expansion rate was faster). https://cds.cern.ch/images/CERN-HOMEWEB-PHO-2022-023-1 https://cds.cern.ch/images/CERN-HOMEWEB-PHO-2022-023-1 Observing the edge is effectively looking back in time, to see the conditions of the universe closer to the time of the Big Bang. New telescopes keep expanding that edge, and new particle colliders (such as those at CERN or Fermilab) keep "bashing 2 rocks together to make fire" - recreating the conditions of the Big Bang to see what comes off. What I'm not sure about is whether the speed of light (assumed to be constant) is correlated with the size of the observable universe. Perhaps a physicist could shed some light on that question. Relativity means that galaxies that are moving at the speed of light away from one another (one travelling at c, another travelling at -c) have a relative velocity of higher than the speed of light (|c| + |-c| = 2c). There's also the theory of the One Electron Universe, which I quite like (though that reveals my bias as an electronic systems engineer). Perhaps what we see is the One photon universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe Hopefully this rambling makes sense to someone!
  - ck2 2y ago
    Wait, I get space expanding and accelerating. I never considered time expanding (and accelerating?). Is that even possible? What does that imply?
    - peterburkimsher 2y ago
      Finding a way to reverse the expansion of the universe would imply time travel being possible. It hasn't happened yet, but perhaps that's just a technological limitation. And if you ask my Mac, then Time Machine is very much possible - that's just the name of the backup system. The question starts to become very philosophical if there is a backup system for this universe. Everything being saved, for eternity, in infinite time. It would require very advanced computational power and storage, but it would probably work in binary (but that's just the kind of thing a computer engineer would say). Maybe, though, the observable universe is rotating clockwise around a centre that is in the unobservable universe, and time is just a measure of how many rotations have been made since the Big Bang.

kmoser 2y ago

Dumber question: would a galaxy that appears to spin clockwise appear to spin counter-clockwise when viewed from the other side? Does this imply that the real question is why galaxies' relative orientations seem to favor more spinning in one direction than the other?

smeej 2y ago
This is exactly the dumb question I came here to ask. So now I wait with you for a less dumb person to reply. My clock certainly seems to tick in the opposite direction when I look at it from behind.
- nuccy 2y ago
  Answering to your and original question above: there are no poles (or axes of rotation) in the Universe. On large scales (think distances to include thousands and millions of galaxies each with billions of stars with even more planets) the Universe is uniform - isotropic and homogeneous [1]. It is expanding with acceleration in all direction in each and every point of its space, so there is no preferred direction thus in average we should have 50% of clockwise and 50% of counter-clockwise galaxies since orientation of those should also be absolutely random in average, unless something when the Universe was being created or evolving affected that balance. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
  - smeej 2y ago
    So it makes about as much sense to ask why 2/3rds of the galaxies are "upside-down" from our vantage point, because there's no clear reason it should be something other than 50% in a sample size this large?
    - jfengel 2y ago
      Correct. On the largest scales it should be 50-50. If it's not that would add a significant term to the Big Bang that nobody had previously expected. It would be a rather big deal... if it holds up.

Gooblebrai 2y ago

Regardless of if this is the case, the idea certainly blew my mind

alfiedotwtf 2y ago
lol, I’m glad it wasn’t just me that thought “woah wait. wtf did you just say??!”

blackhaj7 2y ago

Wow, interesting thought

xtiansimon 2y ago
Universe of left-handed people.

fennecfoxy 2y ago

That would be super cool to find out! And then it also begs the question, is there something at the center that unites the two poles? If so then what is it! It would also imply that our whole universe is rotating - the only reason this happens on Earth is because of our planets rotation and the Coriolis effect.

thunder-blue-3 2y ago
I've been following this news for the past couple of weeks-- in essence your statement is what they are hypothesizing, and that the "something at the center that unites the two poles" might be that we are within a black hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology for the curious.
- nashashmi 2y ago
  “The universe is an orb and that orb is rotating causing all the other stuff to spiral.” This was a long held theory of mine because I could not understand why a galaxy would spiral. I think there is a men in black scene, where an alien is rotating the universe globe like a toy they are playing.
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    > This was a long held theory of mine because I could not understand why a galaxy would spiral. I think in general it would be unusual if they didn’t rotate. Any large non-uniform mass of gas or rocks when colliding will induce some rotation. What is odd though is that for galaxies we see more of them spinning one way than another.
  - eightysixfour 2y ago
    Doesn’t it have to spiral? Think of the gravity well, anything not orbiting is just falling. The only things not racing towards the black hole at the center of the galaxy are the ones that are orbiting.
    - 2y ago

wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB 2y ago

Potentially a very good question!

tiffanyh 2y ago

My own dumb question … How does cyclones/hurricanes relate to being “on one of two ‘poles’”? Do you mean hemisphere?

jeffdn 2y ago
If all of the galaxies we see rotate the same way, are we “looking down” from a pole and seeing only those with the same rotation we have, as opposed to a more equatorial view that would be evenly split.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  But the universe isn’t spherical. I’m not sure I understand this hypothesis as explained.
  - pests 2y ago
    But the observable universe roughly is.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      The observable universe is an illusory artifact of being an observer traveling at less than the speed of light. A constant distance in every direction is a sphere. That tells us nothing about the actual structure of the universe. In other words, your observable universe is different than mine and that's both spheres we're in the middle of. That suggests the universe itself probably isn't a sphere.
      - SkyBelow 2y ago
        Is it an illusory artifact or is it all that exists? If it can't be observed, it can't be tested, it can't be verified in any way or ever interacted with, then isn't it just an instances of Russell's Teapot and thus does not exist? What does it mean for science if existence isn't a binary property or one that we set as a truth yet is entirely untestable?

permo-w 2y ago

maybe this is a stupid question, but is it possible that the big bang simply had some kind of clockwise angular momentum to it? how different is that idea from the black hole cosmology concept? I don't really understand how the two fit together

Reubachi 2y ago
I don't believe the current consensus is that motion from big bang imparted a spin on objects. Rather, that dark matter (mass) was "dropped" all over as a result of the bang, making gravitational hot spots. Millions of years of dark energy progression affects those hotspots, making a sort of ever expanding (yet perceptively slowing down) sink drain with water pouring into it.
ziofill 2y ago
It’s different because it’s simpler to assume that the total angular momentum of the universe is zero. If one black hole is rotating one way there must be other stuff rotating the other way to counterbalance. If you assume instead that the whole universe has angular momentum, well, where did that come from?
- rdtsc 2y ago
  > If you assume instead that the whole universe has angular momentum, well, where did that come from Would that be same kind of question as “where did the Big Bang come from?”. That’s a lot of energy that came from somewhere as well seemingly for no good reason. I also wondered immediately about dark matter; could it be that’s where the counter-balance of momentum went? Like most galaxies spin one way and most dark matter would then have to spin the opposite way. I am not a physicist so this is all random guessing of course.
  - RandomBacon 2y ago
    > That’s a lot of energy that came from somewhere as well seemingly for no good reason. I never finished the book, but this reminds me of God's Debris by Scott Adams which explores a philosophy of pandeism (where God annihilated itself and became the universe).

eagerpace 2y ago

https://mapoftheuniverse.net https://mapoftheuniverse.net While we don't believe we're the center of the universe, I believe we're limited by instrumentation to determine its size. Best guess now is 100B LY in diameter.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
100B LY is a little bit larger than the observable universe. But the observable universe is a fraction of the whole thing. The "best guess" right now is that the total universe is flat and has no end. If it's bounded, 100B LY is orders of magnitude below the most conservative lower-bound estimates, which I believe start at around 300-500x that size. (With huge error bars on all sides.)
cozyman 2y ago
that's the neat part, it is though

analog31 2y ago

We're equidistant from the edge of the observable universe in all directions. One would think that puts us at the center. (But the same is true for someone sitting on another planet).

ajross 2y ago
Some of that is a semantic thing about how one defines "distant", but this is not really required by GR. In fact the insight behind the emerging "timescape" theories is that the universe isn't flat or homogenous on large scales and that different regions have expanded at different rates. Their "edges" are equally old, but may not be not equally "distant".
adolph 2y ago
> equidistant from the edge of the observable universe in all directions That seems like an example of "streetlight effect." The streetlight effect, or the drunkard's search principle, is a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
- jordanb 2y ago
  It's not. Rather it's that every observer in the universe is at the center of their own light cone. The fact that we can not observe anything outside our light cone is well understood.

hnuser123456 2y ago

There is a dipole/toroidal universe theory: https://evolvingsouls.com/blog/toroidal-universe/ https://evolvingsouls.com/blog/toroidal-universe/ Pardon the cheesy domain name, the content is very relevant.

MichaelDickens 2y ago

IIRC the Virgo Supercluster is gravitationally bound. Pure speculation but my guess would be that galaxies are revolving around the center of the Virgo Supercluster and this creates the galaxy-level Coriolis effect.