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James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rotate Clockwise (smithsonianmag.com) 69

Posted by BeauHD from the what-gives dept.
The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that a surprising majority of galaxies rotate clockwise, challenging the long-held belief in a directionally uniform universe; this anomaly could suggest either our universe originated inside a rotating black hole or that astronomers have been misinterpreting the universe's expansion due to observational biases. Smithsonian Magazine reports: The problem is that astronomers have long posited that galaxies should be evenly split between rotating in one direction or the other, astronomer Dan Weisz from the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the study, wrote for Astronomy back in 2017. "This stems from the idea that we live in an 'isotropic' universe, which means that the universe looks roughly the same in every direction. By extension, galaxies shouldn't have a preferred direction of spin from our perspective," he added. According to Shamir, there are two strong potential explanations for this discrepancy. One explanation is that the universe came into existence while in rotation. This theory would support what's known as black hole cosmology: the hypothesis that our universe exists within a black hole that exists within another parent universe. In other words, black holes create universes within themselves, meaning that the black holes in our own universe also lead to other baby universes.

"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, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Haven who was not involved in the study, tells Space.com's Robert Lea. "The discovery by the JWST that galaxies rotate in a preferred direction would support the theory of black holes creating new universes, and I would be extremely excited if these findings are confirmed."

Another possible explanation involves the Milky Way's rotation. 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. "If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," Shamir explains in the statement. "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." The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rotate Clockwise More | Reply

James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rotate Clockwise

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  • So, someone on the other side of the universe... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Is seeing them rotating counterclockwise, which restores the symmetry, no?

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      No. Use your left hand and curl your fingers around clockwise keeping your thumb out. Now flip your hand over, notice that your thumb is still oriented the same with respect to your fingers.

    • If there's sides it's not isotropic.

      • Several legit astrophysicists have proposed this based on evidence, but their experimental results haven't reached... 5 std deviations of accuracy (?) Forgive me I'm not an astrophysicist.. but this dude at MIT says his team is iterating over their measurements with ever improving accuracy, and he is confident they will measure to the accepted threshold to prove their conjecture....haven't had enough coffee to remember exactly what they said BUT it's roughly like this: he does suggest the universe as a whol

    • Someone on the other side of a galaxy we're observing would indeed see it spin the other way. But observing this way gives an even distribution. This study looked at the spin of other galaxies relative to the spin of the milky way. A modern astrophysicist would expect an even distribution, but that's not what's observed. This is all very new and they haven't ruled out experimental error.

  • I wonder if this might also have something to do with some of the other statistical biases we find in nature. Things like the chirality of proteins, or even why we have a preponderance of matter vs. anti-matter. We find the same geometric patterns at all sorts of different scales - like the curl of a fern to the arms of a spiral galaxy - so an inherent direction of rotation might be another common factor.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      Nah, it just proves the whole universe is a toilet.
    • The JWST is far from the first telescope to look at large numbers of distant galaxies and this study only looks at 263 and then claims that the discrepancy is so obvious that it can be seen simply by looking at images. If that is true then why has no previous study of large numbers of galaxies seen the same effect? For example, this one [oup.com] that looked at over 1,400 galaxies and also looked at spins relative to the nearest cosmic filament, taking into account the local structure.

      Large, highly obvious effects

  • Because the aliens all drive on the left (Score:3)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @05:40AM (#65275739)
    Aliens drive on the left, so their roundabouts go round clockwise. Obviously

    This is because they didn't have Napoleon making them drive on the right.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      All British are aliens but not all aliens are British.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossdee ( 243626 )

        Kiwis, Ozzies, and Japanese also drive on the left.

        • So did the Romans, which may be where the Brits got it. Napoleon was the one who implemented right-side driving, which is why the rest of Europe does it. I have no idea why the US is right-side, having been British colonies that split from the UK and Europe before Napoleon.
    • Seems to be evidence that God really is an Englishman...or potentially Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Australian or a New Zealander but at least it narrows the field.

  • Probably a bogus study (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Samare ( 2779329 ) on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @06:04AM (#65275765)

    "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 [studies] have found no significant evidence of anisotropy."
    https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]

  • Relative to the viewer? From Earth, presumably? Facing in which direction?

    • looking from below it's counter clockwise , looking from above its clockwise . Poor author should go back to geometry class it seems.

  • Just turn them upside down. Problem solved.

  • Who writes such headlines (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hmilz ( 3035377 ) on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @07:39AM (#65275875)
    When I read about this finding 2 weeks ago, I couldn't help asking myself "who writes such headlines". It it completely bogus. In space, by definition, there is no preferred up or down, left or right, front or back, clockwise or counterclockwise. These notions are always relative to the observer. OK, in this case it's us. But they are never absolute, which is why that makes no sense. Rotation of a body is mathematically defined by its rotation vector. If you look at a rotating body and the rotation vector points at you, you see the body rotating CCW, and CW otherwise. This is what other commenters refer to as the right-hand rule. If you bend the fingers of your right hand and point the thumb at you, the fingers point in CCW direction. What the article says is that it appears that most galaxies within the sample seem to have a rotation vector which has a radial component pointing away from us, which you can easily visualize by pointing the thumb slightly away from you. But the notion of CW or CCW is entirely bogus in this example because it depends on your aspect angle. If we were to watch a galaxy rotating "CW" from the other side, it would be seen rotating CCW. It appears the author of this article does not trust his readers with this spatial imagination, and everyone else copied the headline without thinking. And while we're at it - the doppler shift does not make a galaxy appear brighter or dimmer. Instead, the part of a rotating body moving towards us (or rather, the part whose motion vector has a radial component pointing towards us) will be blue shifted, the other part red. This is how we can determine the rotation of a galaxy to begin with. Duh. Anyway - the finding, if statistically confirmed, would be interesting enough without this fuzzy clickbait. However, one would have to check if a potential preferred direction coincides with the anisotropy that has been known for long for the cosmic microwave background. Everything else (we're inside a black hole etc.) is theoretical astrophysics speculation which can hardly ever confirmed by actual observations.

  • I'm reminded of... (Score:3)

    by sajavete ( 5054387 ) on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @07:51AM (#65275903)
    ... that muon wobble Fermilab found a few years back. I wonder if something like that could be aggregating upwards..?

  • So it confrims what the Galaxy Zoo found (Score:3)

    by Laxator2 ( 973549 ) on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @08:40AM (#65276021)

    I remember that this was a surprising find by the Galaxy Zoo project

    https://zoo4.galaxyzoo.org/ [galaxyzoo.org]

    At the time there was a suspicion that humans have a tendency to notice a direction of rotation more than the other, but now it looks more and more like the asymmetry is real.

  • Doesn't whether a galaxy spins clockwise or counterclockwise depend on which side you look at it from? They, after all, don't have a defined "top" or "bottom".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      'top or bottom' doesn't really matter - if you look at a galaxy from earth, it rotates (say) clockwise if you're in the Northern or Southern hemisphere, or if you stand on your head or whatever else.

      Like everything, it's an earth-centric observation. From here, they look like they rotate clockwise. What the locals in each of those galaxies think is an entirely different matter. Same goes for their ages - we think of them as being X million years old, but the locals in them think of them entirely differently

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      Yes, but you can take any arbitrary direction - for example your own spin axis - and define that as "up" and then measure rotation relative to that and you should still arrive at a 50/50 distribution. Just the sign changes.

  • The expected value is 50/50, which would be across all universes. So far, we have only sampled this universe. Also, their dataset is pretty small, about 300 galaxies. There are a _lot_ more galaxies than that, around 100 billion. The standard error of their measurement is enormous.

  • Does this mean the galaxies are south of the equator?

  • Doesn't that depends from the Point of view?

  • The click-bait title says "most" while leaving out the scientific "most observed".
  • Has covered this in: Could The Universe Be Inside A Black Hole? the big bang singularity has interesting correlations to the black hole singularity https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Another possible explanation involves the Milky Way's rotation. 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 would think that effects due to well understood phenomena like Doppler shifts would have been corrected for going back nearly as far as Edwin Hubble/Georges Lemaitre.

  • Does that mean we are in the northern hemisphere of the universe?

  • Back in the 50's we had a doctoral student living with us and she was studying the spin on particles and she did find a bias.

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