James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/james-webb-space-telescope-reveals-that-most-galaxies-rotate-clockwise-180986224/

by instagraham • 1 year ago

356 310 1 year ago

smithsonianmag.com

perihelions6• 1 year ago

Also

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43372271 ("Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This JWS Telescope discovery (space.com)", 56 comments)

alenrozac• 1 year ago

At this point I'm open to believing our Universe is in a black-hole-like structure.

d--b2• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

I'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?

exe344• 1 year ago

I think it would be more that the entire universe is in a black hole spinning in a certain direction.

iainmerrick4• 1 year ago

It'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• 1 year ago

Is 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

pandemic_region• 1 year ago

Of all the mind-boggling answers explaining this direction-of-spin thing, they picked the one saying "Hey actually you know what, our entire (mind-boggingly large) universe itself is located in a black hole. That'll explain things nicely."

d--b2• 1 year ago

The convenience of black-boxy things!

pixl974• 1 year ago

I mean the universe in a black hole is one of the more common ideas in physics, though we don't have any evidence for it. So it's not surprising people pick it up and run with it.

With that said, when the universe was younger things were way way closer so would it be possible for things like very early massive quasars to inject powerful magnetic fields in the otherwise dark universe at this time and bias matter falling into galaxies to one direction or another?

bustling-noose• 1 year ago

Now if only we could see inside a black hole.

snitty• 1 year ago

If 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• 1 year ago

The 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• 1 year ago

wouldn'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?

1oooqooq2• 1 year ago

why? if you subscribe to big bang then all matter got the same "initial kick". would be easier to assume same spin?

iainmerrick4• 1 year ago

I was wondering the same thing -- "direction of spin" is ambiguous on its own, you also need to pick which direction is up.

But if objective spin directions are roughly evenly split because the universe is isotropic, the spins from our viewpoint ought to be evenly split as well.

If they're not evenly split, the universe must have a preferred axis, which would be an amazing discovery. I guess if the preferred axis just happens to align with our own galaxy, that would support the alternative theory that it's due to an observation effect such as doppler shift.

Either way, it's incredibly cool to have such a simple but totally unexpected observation pop up out of nowhere.

RotationPedant• 1 year ago

That is correct, "clockwise" only makes sense relative to a single observer: on Earth we set up out coordinate system so that the Milky Way's directed axis of rotation points one way, and most galaxies have it pointing the other way. "Clockwise / counterclockwise" makes sense for images coming from telescopes but it's not cosmologically meaningful.

Note that this is not that easy to determine:

  When done manually, the determination of the direction of rotation of a galaxy can be a subjective task, as different annotators might have different opinions regarding the direction towards a galaxy rotates. A simple example is the crowdsourcing annotation through Galaxy Zoo 1 (Land et al. 2008), where in the vast majority of the galaxies different annotators provided conflicting annotations. Therefore, the annotations shown in Fig. 1 were made by a computer analysis that followed a defined symmetric model (Shamir 2024e).

The point is that we would typically assume a 50-50 ratio regardless of where you are in the universe.

Patient03• 1 year ago

The 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."

keyle• 1 year 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?

Gooblebrai• 1 year ago

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

alfiedotwtf• 1 year ago

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

blackhaj7• 1 year ago

Wow, interesting thought

xtiansimon• 1 year ago

Universe of left-handed people.

fennecfoxy• 1 year 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• 1 year 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 for the curious.

whamlastxmas2• 1 year ago

*raises the question

wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB• 1 year ago

Potentially a very good question!

tiffanyh• 1 year ago

My own dumb question …

How does cyclones/hurricanes relate to being “on one of two ‘poles’”?

Do you mean hemisphere?

jeffdn• 1 year 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.

permo-w5• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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?

eagerpace• 1 year ago

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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

that's the neat part, it is though

analog31• 1 year 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).

ajross2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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

hnuser1234562• 1 year ago

There is a dipole/toroidal universe theory: https://evolvingsouls.com/blog/toroidal-universe/

Pardon the cheesy domain name, the content is very relevant.

JumpCrisscross• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

vonneumannstan3• 1 year ago

The same place the rest of the universe came from. A slight imbalance in the Matter-Antimatter distribution in the early universe

MichaelDickens• 1 year 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.

thebeardisred• 1 year ago

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

peterburkimsher5• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

kmoser• 1 year 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?

smeej4• 1 year 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.

ajross2• 1 year ago

Yes, that's it exactly. There's a net asymmetry in the distribution of galaxy axes. "Clockwise" by itself is a relative term. This seems to be the paper in question: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798

That said: I'd wait a bit here. This is a single-author paper by a non-astronomer (he's a CS professor). The sample size seems small (N=263), and the measurement coarse (he's just bucketing galaxies into "rotating in the same/different direction as the Milky Way"). And the technique may be too novel for its own good. The gold standard here would be to look at differential redshift, but all he's doing is applying a ML filter to detect the "twirl" direction in the image of the spiral galaxy. Which... might be amazingly effective or might fall on its face because of bugs in the filter.

But the signal seems strong, though (158 vs. 105 galaxies in each direction).

Basically, I'd wait a bit for someone to try to replicate with more data and more conventional measurements.

MoonGhost• 1 year ago

when viewed from the other side?

Nobody has done it so far. We have only theories and hypothesis.

DonHopkins• 1 year ago

Unless 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• 1 year ago

Everybody 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.”

perihelions6• 1 year ago

I don't understand how the 1e-16 Hz rotation of the Milky Way affects how we perceive other spiral galaxies' orientations.

scythe• 1 year 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

tomrod• 1 year ago

Relative motion to the center. 230 km/s is fast.

1oooqooq2• 1 year ago

that's trivial to model... if anyone looking for a phd topic that sounds complex but only involves basic trig. (conclusion will probably be a No)

dodslaser• 1 year ago

Did they also check in the northern hemisphere of the observable universe?

worldsayshi3• 1 year ago

Clockwise relative to what? Does the universe have an "upwards" direction?

Or is it just relative to all the other galaxies?

andrewaylett2• 1 year ago

Clockwise 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.

MichaelZuo7• 1 year ago

How 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?

worldsayshi3• 1 year ago

relative to our viewpoint

That would seem way more surprising than relative to a arbitrarily selected common upwards direction and it would imply that we are somehow at the center/top of the universe.

okdood64• 1 year ago

So it would've been more "broadly" true to say: JWST discovers that most galaxies rotate in the _same_ direction?

xeornet• 1 year ago

Sorry 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?

mech987876• 1 year ago

My best guess would be using a standard coordinate system such as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergalactic_coordinate_sys...

Patient03• 1 year ago

zurfer• 1 year ago

Complete 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• 1 year ago

I 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• 1 year ago

What about black hole new mass/energy converting into orthogonal space ??? ( ..is it part of Principia Unitas ??).

floxy2• 1 year 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

like_any_other3• 1 year 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?logi...) links to a few papers discussing this, among them 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• 1 year ago

One side is moving away from us, the other towards. This means their relative speeds are different, detectably so.

perihelions6• 1 year ago

How are you linking that effect to the spin orientation of the Milky Way galaxy? Where is the all-sky anisotropy coming from?

anomaloustho2• 1 year ago

I 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• 1 year ago

I 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

like_any_other3• 1 year ago

perihelions [1] phrased it best - a galaxy spinning clockwise is just the mirror image of one spinning counter-clockwise. So why should mirroring change brightness? I don't really understand why Doppler beaming would cause this (though one of the papers did also mention it).

The other question is - what does the rotation of our own galaxy have to do with it? Let's keep the Solar system as is, and mirror the rest of the Milky Way around it, so that it is now spinning the opposite direction. Why should this affect the apparent brightness of other galaxies? Especially since the Solar system is effectively moving in a straight line, on the scale of a human lifetime.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43535285

ordu• 1 year ago

Well, I don't know physics, but from I heard of it, there are two kinds of phenomena that are sensitive to a rotation. One is quantum particles, they have fixed spin, but won't delve into that topic, because I suspect that their "spin" is like the charm of the charm quark, probably physicists just liked the sound of a word and used it. But there is one other thing I heard about: electromagnetism. If you run charged particles in circles, they create magnetic field that is directed perpendicularly to the circles, and the magnetic field feels different depending on the side of the circles being observed.

I see no way it influences the light emitted, but maybe I heard just too little of physics? BTW, does the direction of magnetic field of galaxies correlate with the direction of their rotation?

edit: Ah, maybe magnetic field can polarize the light? And when you have two magentic fields they polarize in one direction or in two different, and maybe it influences observed brightness of the light? Or maybe it is just an uninformed guess?

andrewclunn• 1 year ago

Time 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.

seydor• 1 year ago

Does it need to be that the whole universe started with rotation, or that our visible part of the universe has a common ancestor?

over_bridge• 1 year ago

Seems 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• 1 year ago

Cosmic 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...

anomaloustho2• 1 year ago

Isn’t there a different observation for why planets tend to orbit in the same direction in a solar system?

deepsun2• 1 year ago

It's easily provable that any matter rotating other way gets expelled or thrown to center (Sun). So majority wins.

albertzeyer• 1 year ago

For 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• 1 year ago

A 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.

BlarfMcFlarf• 1 year ago

Not a physicist, but here is my understanding of the cosmology physics:

High energy can spontaneously form matter antimatter pairs. In the early universe, the heat of the universe was very high, so this was common, constantly happening.

The problem as always if fine tuning. If the early universe was 60-40, that would be understandable. If the early universe was precisely 50-50, that’s fine too. But the universe was 50.0001-49.9999 or something like that, and then all annihilated. It’s too big a difference to easily be random chance, and too small a difference to be easily explained by a starting condition what wasn’t precisely tuned by some mechanism.

permo-w5• 1 year ago

but I was under the impression that equal parts of matter and antimatter annihilate, which would make a 50:50 system remain as such, which is why its such a mystery?

btilly• 1 year ago

In all known physical processes, the baryon number is conserved. Particles with a positive baryon number are the heavy particles in matter. Think protons, neutrons, and so on. Particles with a negative number are antimatter. Think antiprotons, and antineutrons. And particles with a 0 baryon number are not made of quarks. Think leptons like electrons and neutrinos, or bosons like photons and the Higgs boson.

This means that all known ways to create or destroy matter, also creates or destroys an equal amount of antimatter.

It turns out that most attempts to extend the Standard Model allow violations of baryon conservation. This could explain the dominance of matter in our universe. However none of those attempts have been able to make any predictions that matched experiment. And so it remains true that all known physical processes perfectly conserve the baryon number.

(It is also possible that baryon number really is conserved, and dark matter is actually dark antimatter. But we lack a theory of what dark matter could be that predicts this.)

mystified5016• 1 year ago

You would expect a 50/50 ratio because when energy is converted into matter, it's typically in the form of matter/antimatter pairs.

There's nothing special about matter or antimatter. Same energy, just opposite charge. All else being equal, they should be created in equal amounts. As far as we're aware, there is no special property that would make the universe preferentially create more matter than antimatter.

There's also no requirement that the configuration of matter and antimatter be "stable" for whatever definition you want to apply. The only rule is that conserved quantities stay conserved.

otikik• 1 year ago

The fact that we have found left-handed neutrinos but not right-handed ones seems like another one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_neutrino

gerad2• 1 year ago

Dark matter / regular matter

Ygg2• 1 year ago

Left vs right handed molecules

Organic chemistry found on meteors shows that non-terrestrial sources are equally left vs right-handed.

However, the rest might be caused by one or more errors in our premise. The most likely culprit being cosmological principle.

stainablesteel2• 1 year ago

there's also that famous experiment by Chien-Shiung Wu, veritasium did a video on it somewhere

anal_reactor• 1 year ago

I honestly start thinking that the idea "everything should be symmetric in some way..." is completely wrong, and an example of wishful thinking "...because it would be cool if it did". Even if nature is in some way balanced on a scale large enough, it's extremely unlikely for us not to be in some local pocket. Most likely we're a part of some bigger structure that has certain properties, and this affects our perception of the laws of physics.

Nevermark2• 1 year ago

Most likely we're a part of some bigger structure that has certain properties, and this affects our perception of the laws of physics.

Which would also be the reason we have the laws of physics we do in general.

Anything seemingly ad hoc in our universal (from our vantage) viewpoint is potentially explainable as a pocket among all other possible distributions/combinations of relations.

brador• 1 year ago

This to me indicates the primordial particle was spinning clockwise.

lioeters• 1 year ago

How 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• 1 year ago

1. 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?

mnky9800n2• 1 year ago

If 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• 1 year ago

Inside 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.

floxy2• 1 year ago

where is the singularity?

Maybe black holes don't have a singularity:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00841

belter• 1 year ago

This 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• 1 year ago

So, there is a visible order about this matter. That they are "rotating", instead of, for example, "Z-Pattern" movement. Amazing.

vincnetas• 1 year ago

But 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?

Patient03• 1 year ago

floatrock• 1 year ago

So 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?

permo-w5• 1 year ago

this 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?

jncfhnb• 1 year ago

No I don’t think so

Once you have a few dimensions on a normal or other distribution there’s not a lot of content that’s in the middle.

rob742• 1 year ago

It just occured to me that "rotation direction" is a pretty coarse measurement. Actually, you could look at the angle of a galaxy relative to ours, where (let's say) 0° is viewed exactly from "above" (rotating clockwise), 180° is viewed exactly from "below" (rotating counterclockwise), 90°/270° is viewed side-on etc. How about some stats based on this parameter?

kevinb9n• 1 year ago

This was my thought too

q_andrew• 1 year ago

This is actually why rotational math is more complicated in 3d than you would expect. It's something game developers get used to, because accessing and modifying a rotation requires knowing what the orientation is relative to a fourth axis. That's what a quaternion is. In the situation of this story, it's in reference to the milky way's vertical axis.

smeej4• 1 year ago

What does "above" or "below" even mean in the context of something without a top or bottom? Or are you defining "above" to mean "the vantage point from which the galaxy appears to be rotating in the direction of earth clocks" for the purpose of this question?

BubbleRings• 1 year ago

I 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• 1 year ago

The 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• 1 year ago

This 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• 1 year ago

Another 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• 1 year ago

Yeah, 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• 1 year ago

I 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• 1 year ago

So the universe is left handed?

gwbas1c• 1 year ago

I 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• 1 year ago

approximately 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• 1 year ago

The 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• 1 year ago

I 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.

coffeecantcode• 1 year ago

Coming 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.

tiagod• 1 year ago

The 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.

gerad2• 1 year ago

On the antipodal side of the universe they mostly rotate counterclockwise. ;-)

mapt• 1 year ago

Fascinating.

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://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.

stainablesteel2• 1 year ago

so 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

lupusreal2• 1 year ago

Is 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• 1 year ago

Could this be related that the weak force only interacts with left-handed particles (and right-handed antiparticles)?

RobertRoberts• 1 year ago

Everything turns clockwise from a specific perspective... that's what is interesting here, perspective and consistency.

slicktux• 1 year ago

Could an equivalent of the Coriolis Force be at play here?

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

Spin 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-th...

richwater• 1 year ago

The paper measures rotation relative to the Milky Way galaxy.

hnuser1234562• 1 year ago

If 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• 1 year ago

must 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• 1 year ago

We’re six black holes deep

tagami• 1 year ago

If you look at the galaxy from the other side, wouldn’t it be counterclockwise?

bigmadshoe2• 1 year ago

Yes, but I think the interesting thing is that there are a greater number of galaxies spinning one way than another.

soulofmischief8• 1 year ago

What if we're just upside down? :)

geor9e• 1 year ago

TIL 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

93po2• 1 year ago

sorry 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.

pixl974• 1 year ago

In 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.

93po2• 1 year ago

That 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.

rambojohnson• 1 year ago

got it.

bilsbie• 1 year ago

Maybe anti matter galaxies would spin the other way

rezmason• 1 year ago

Shouldn't the galaxies in the northern and southern hemispheres spiral in opposite directions? /s

wojo1206• 1 year ago

US left-handed presidents are also over-represented. This is another reason to feel special in our neighborhood.

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

Correction: Oops, The Telescope Was Just Spinning Counter-Clockwise, Our Bad

martini333• 1 year ago

My clock also runs clockwise, when seen from one of two sides...

jiggawatts• 1 year ago

They 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• 1 year ago

isn’t counterclockwise same as clockwise whe viewed from the other side?

nabla9• 1 year 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://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021ApJ...907..123I/abstra...

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_dist...

iainmerrick4• 1 year ago

Thank you. That's a shame, it was a cool-sounding story, just unlikely enough to sound plausible.

datavirtue• 1 year ago

Clockwise? To which observer?

twothreeone2• 1 year ago

Wow and not even 24 hours after Trump takes aim at the Smithsonian.

*) The article is from March 17.

khazhoux• 1 year ago

Is this just word association, or you saying there’s some notable connection here?

antonvs2• 1 year ago

The author is also a proponent of tired light theory, which has been thoroughly refuted.

pal9000i• 1 year ago

I was prepared to be mindblown. He lost all credibility to me

smath• 1 year ago

Several 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• 1 year ago

Should we expect the big bang to have been completely symmetrical? If not, wouldn't most galaxies spin one way versus the other?

wwarner• 1 year ago

A sample size of 263 galaxies isn’t enough to draw any conclusion.

_kst_• 1 year ago

The 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• 1 year ago

Candidate for hardest collective fall for an April Fool's Day joke in Hacker News history?

nottorp2• 1 year ago

So do the galaxies rotate clockwise, or did we make clocks that rotate in the direction the galaxies choose? :)

raattgift2• 1 year ago

Sundials 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_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-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?

nottorp2• 1 year ago

Heh I was joking but you can trust HN to have someone come up with a comprehensive explanation for anything :)

DrNosferatu• 1 year ago

Wait - even if seen from the opposite side?

Mekaniko• 1 year ago

Does that mean we're in the northern or southern unisphere ?

James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise

Related Stories