Puzzling observation by JWST: Galaxies in the deep universe rotate in the same direction:
In just over three years since its launch, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has generated significant and unprecedented insights into the far reaches of space, and a new study by a Kansas State University researcher provides one of the simplest and most puzzling observations of the deep universe yet.
In images of the deep universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, the vast majority of the galaxies rotate in the same direction, according to research by Lior Shamir, associate professor of computer science at the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering. About two thirds of the galaxies rotate clockwise, while just about a third of the galaxies rotate counterclockwise.
The study—published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society—was done with 263 galaxies in the JADES field that were clear enough to identify their direction of rotation.
"The analysis of the galaxies was done by quantitative analysis of their shapes, but the difference is so obvious that any person looking at the image can see it," Shamir said. "There is no need for special skills or knowledge to see that the numbers are different. With the power of the James Webb Space Telescope, anyone can see it."
In a random universe, the number of galaxies that rotate in one direction should be roughly the same as the number of galaxies that rotate in the other direction. The fact that JWST shows that most galaxies rotate in the same direction is therefore unexpected.
"It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations," Shamir said.
"One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole. But if the universe was indeed born rotating it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete."
The Earth also rotates around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and because of the Doppler shift effect, researchers expect that light coming from galaxies rotating the opposite of the Earth's rotation is generally brighter because of the effect.
That could be another explanation for why such galaxies are overrepresented in the telescope observations, Shamir said. Astronomers may need to reconsider the effect of the Milky Way's rotational velocity—which had traditionally been considered to be too slow and negligible in comparison to other galaxies—on their measurements.
"If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," he said.
"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."
Journal Reference: Lior Shamir, The distribution of galaxy rotation in JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2025). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staf292
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, @06:19AM (8 children)
Is it a reasonable assumption that if we find intelligent life in that 1/3 of counter-clockwise galaxies, they'll favor their wrong-hand?
Does galaxy formation influence life down to the chirality of its proteins? (Instead, is it a reasonable conclusion that nothing in the galaxy, sun, planet's magnetic field, will really determine which order of chirality was chosen?)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday April 14, @06:38AM (3 children)
Chirality probability is determined by a tiny parity violation between the energy of left-handed and right-handed molecules:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9491092/ [nih.gov]
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday April 14, @06:45AM (2 children)
Here's another article attributing the asymmetry to magnetic fields:
https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-could-explain-why-life-molecules-are-left-or-right-handed [science.org]
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Monday April 14, @11:17AM (1 child)
While this is a potential explanation, Occam suggests it was chance.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday April 14, @01:41PM
Well, if a legitimate explanation can be found, it's inappropriate to use Occam's Razor.
OTOH, with only one sample, chance is quite plausible...so the "legitimate explanation" needs to be strongly supported.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 14, @10:15AM (3 children)
My guess is that these two things, handedness and galactic rotation direction, are unrelated. Consider that if you look at a clockwise rotating galaxy from its other side, the rotation will be counterclockwise. In contrast, chirality is evident no matter what the orientation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zocalo on Monday April 14, @01:09PM (2 children)
That doesn't rule out there being some inherent universal direction of rotation, but 33% is rather a large number to have experienced something that caused them to override that, so either different parts of the universe are moving in different directions (again, that feels possible - brownian motion in the plasma, or different branches of the cosmic web, perhaps?), in which case perhaps the local direction of travel has some influence on chirality, something else really strange - and almost certainly highly energetic - happened in the early universe and chirality is caused by something else, or - as TFS suggests - further evidence that we're measuring extreme distances incorrectly.
Relevant to chirality or not, this is a fascinating observation that I suspect is going to lead to some really interesting (and probably a few totally absurd) theories about the early universe.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 14, @05:26PM (1 child)
I also think of it this way. For the universe as a whole, there may be many features that are essentially random, that is, there is no reason for them to be at any particular value. That value can be a constant, or it could be a value changing at a predictable rate. The expansion rate (maybe), and rotation rate, could be such random features. The rotation rate could be a random value distributed in a bell curve around 0. The odds of a value on a bell curve being exactly at the 50% spot, while higher than for any other single value, are rather low compared to the odds of not being right at 50%. So by this kind of argument, it seems highly likely that the universe as a whole would have some rotation. Likewise with the expansion of the universe-- it could be expanding (a positive value) or contracting (a negative value), or precisely and so very finely balanced between these 2 possibilities so that it is static, neither expanding nor contracting.
Another value of that kind is the ellipticity of an orbit. Orbits do circularize, but it seems they never quite get perfectly circular. If the universe has some rotation, how much ellipticity might there be?
Another question is, if there is large scale rotation, then where is the center? That would give the universe a center of sorts. Does the universe have a center? So, another aspect of this argument is that, suppose the universe is infinitely large. And that if we are indeed seeing a large scale rotation, it is not a rotation of the entire universe, but only a finite part of it. A very, very large finite part of the universe, maybe the entire observable universe, but nevertheless only finite.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by zocalo on Monday April 14, @06:08PM
From what I understand of the formative period of the universe, after the initial period of cooling there was a essentially just a soup of sub-atomic particle plasma, hence my suggestion of the possibility of some form of Brownian motion. Then particles began to form, and with it mass and gravity, so we get the formation of the cosmic web, a 3D spider's web of strands of gas and free particles that gradually coalesced into the filaments of galaxy clusters and vast intergalactic voids that we see today. That may have already picked up some direction from the early Brownian motion, but it seems likely that each filament of the web would start to align direction under the force of gravity as well, from a given vantage point you would be looking through different threads, each potentially flowing in a different direction. That gives you motion, but doesn't require a specific central point around which everything revolves; it's more like brownian motion applied to strands of spaghetti rather than particles.
We know we, and the rest of our supercluster, is moving towards the Great Attractor (whatever that is - it's currently hidden behind the core of the Milky Way, but most likely a supercluster), which is in turn moving towards the Shapley Supercluster, so we have a way of measuring how galaxy clusters are moving relative to each other. I've not come across anything that tries to model the flows and show it as an animation though, just hypothetical models showing how the cosmic web, and the universe as we know it, would only form within certain constraints on the parameters of the Big Bang. Maybe it's time to dig out Universe Sandbox again...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Monday April 14, @07:09AM (4 children)
Does Conservation of Momentum survive being deconstructed by the physics of a black hole?
I've had a belief that our universe is rotating. Although the angular velocity is glacial by comparison to human lifespan, the diameter is huge. I get the idea that by just standing on Earth, I am traveling at close to the speed of light, just as I travel faster on a merry-go-round ( toward the edge ) than I travel at the center of the ride ( where I simply rotate ), which would be the same speed if I had simply stepped off the ride.
With Einstein's observation of relativity, this might explain why time, mass, and gravity ( time-space curvature ) exist, and how time can elapse at different rates at different places, even though I would not be able to sense this with my biological sensors, as I only sense ratios ).
I can't help but think that the redshift we observe as a function of distance is actually an artifact of straight-line versus the curved ( Coriolis) trajectory something traveling at a finite fixed speed would take.
I get the idea this redshift Doppler thing has something to do with the spiral arms we observe...as the galaxy rotates, they stretch. If they were static, like wagon wheel spokes, and not stretching, the redshift would not exist.
But then, we weren't being constantly slung apart by rotational inertia, would black holes stop evaporating into subatomic particles, which seems to reassemble themselves into hydrogen in places ( like the centers of stars and planets ). Where else is all that hydrogen in Natural Gas come from? Being light and tiny as it is, it should have all outgassed eons ago.
So, is the Universe one-time or eternal? Static or is it cyclic? I get the idea that it is eternal, "globally" static, but locally dynamic, with the only thing constant being the sum of energy and mass, even though the ratio oscillates.
I am not a astrophysicist, which is probably blatantly obvious to someone who is. I am likely more full of BS than a bull.
I am just running this up the pole to see what comes back. I find often if I want to learn something, I must first acknowledge my ignorance.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, @11:01AM
Although the angular velocity is glacial by comparison to human lifespan, the diameter is huge. I get the idea that by just standing on Earth, I am traveling at close to the speed of light
The Universe cannot be rigid. It doesn't need to be - water circling the drain of a sink will show higher angular velocity close to the drain.
Has someone measured the epsilon/mu of the vacuum some billion ly away? What warranty we have they are the same?
(that's to say waaaay more explanation exist for the redshift. Including the Universe is falling into a black-hole
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, @02:30PM (2 children)
Circling the drain.. coriolis effect
(Score: 3, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 14, @05:32PM (1 child)
Well, I have thought the shape of a galaxy spiral matches the shape of water spiraling down a toilet bowl. Which means that the universe is a sh*tty place?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, @06:39PM
Doesn't really matter, it's only meant to be used once while we island hop to nirvana
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, @08:22AM
So maybe it's just a regional thing but for a very very large region (e.g. observable universe), and if you somehow manage to observe a different part stuff could be rotating a different direction.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bart9h on Tuesday April 15, @02:30AM
The title is "Galaxies in the Deep Universe Rotate in the Same Direction".
Then we get that is not all, but "most" of the galaxies.
Then we find that it is actually 2/3, which is closer to 1/2 than it is to 1/1.