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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: 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!