New evidence suggests that the universe, previously thought to have been both symmetrical and born as a symmetric shape, like a ball, may have begun in rotation and without isotropic properties.
Credit: NASA, ESA
The researchers found evidence that galaxies tend to rotate in a preferred direction. They uncovered an excess of left-handed, or counter-clockwise rotating, spirals in the part of the sky toward the north pole of the Milky Way. The effect extended beyond 600 million light years away.
“The excess is small, about 7 percent, but the chance that it could be a cosmic accident is something like one in a million,” Longo said. “These results are extremely important because they appear to contradict the almost universally accepted notion that on sufficiently large scales the universe is isotropic, with no special direction.”
The work provides new insights about the shape of the Big Bang. A symmetric and isotropic universe would have begun with a spherically symmetric explosion shaped like a basketball. If the universe was born rotating, like a spinning basketball, Longo said, it would have a preferred axis, and galaxies would have retained that initial motion.
Of course, commentators on the above-linked article make a good point: we are witnessing this supposed “spinning” from own insignificant and rather random place within the universe. As a person named Raygunner noted:
We are measuring this from Earth’s point of view. Unless we are in the center of the Universe looking outwards I agree with david534, it makes no sense. It’s likely we are on the outer parts looking around but we have no idea where the center is. So we could see a handedness favoring one galaxy rotation direction or another depending on a) our location, b) expansion rates in our neighborhood, c) universal rotation and rotation direction, and d) the possibility that we are looking THROUGH the Universal center of rotation to the far side without knowing this.
Does this not depend on your point of view or is it the same result no matter where you are?
Then again, we know that Earth turns counter-clockwise around its axis, and even before rockets, we had some sense of the way Earth rotated, thanks to Leon Foucault and others. We didn’t need to get to space or at the center of Earth to determine this. We are unable to get “outside” of the universe, and it’s almost nonsensical to even talk about such a possibility, unless we leave open the possibility of existence multiverses. Regardless, one would think that if the universe is rotating, like planets or galaxies, it would need something to rotate in reference to, like an axis.
This 3D rendering of the universe (pictured below) appears to place the our [[Milky Way Galaxy]] at the apparent center of the universe, but I imagine this was done for simplicity and because the mapped galaxies were obviously mapped in reference to our own. For more information, see here.
Credit: Thomas Jarrett (IPAC/Caltech)
Credit: Thomas Jarrett (IPAC/Caltech)