James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise

It's arbitrary, but that's fine. The important part would be any asymmetry. The Big Bang implies that there shouldn't be one.

Us?

On pictures Milky Way is usually shown to rotate counterclockwise. As is solar system.

If I was an editor at the Smithsonian, I'd be worried about peddling bogus theories for clicks at a time my employer is under scrutiny from the government. Apparently, they are not worried though, which astonishes me, hence my comment.

Wouldn't it be biased towards nearby galaxies? A net rotation of the local cluster would be reasonable. But it would be very wrong to extrapolate that to the whole universe.

Look, if the visible universe is expanding, as we think it is, that is already a direction. Viewing galaxies “from the other side” is not the same in an expanding bubble. It’s like being surprised that many things are redshifted no matter where you look. As for rotations — you could perhaps have some local coriolis force.

The visible universe is redshifted and galaxies are getting further and further away. So jumping straight to “we are in a black hole” is weird

It is far more plausible that there is some coriolis like spinning effect in a higher dimension, even if the universe is flat it could have similar effects to how the earth’s spin makes cyclones all spin in the same direction.

Problem solved. Next?

I'm not sure I understand this response -- basically all of cosmology involves theories based only on somewhat subjective interpretations of sensor data targeting far-off objects. So I don't necessarily disagree.

But what could possibly happen other than they act like all other physical objects do? It boggles the mind to think how broken physics would have to be to accommodate a second correspondence principle for the big-but-not-too-big scale...

I feel like maybe I'm misunderstanding your sentiment, because this seems like a basic shared fact: a clock anywhere in the universe is still a clock.

Answering to your and original question above: there are no poles (or axes of rotation) in the Universe. On large scales (think distances to include thousands and millions of galaxies each with billions of stars with even more planets) the Universe is uniform - isotropic and homogeneous [1]. It is expanding with acceleration in all direction in each and every point of its space, so there is no preferred direction thus in average we should have 50% of clockwise and 50% of counter-clockwise galaxies since orientation of those should also be absolutely random in average, unless something when the Universe was being created or evolving affected that balance.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle

It was my understanding that if two black holes collide, they just form a bigger black hole, but we know there's a black hole in our universe, which then would mean that there's a black hole inside of a black hole that did not merge with the parent black hole, right? Is that something that is considered possible?

“The universe is an orb and that orb is rotating causing all the other stuff to spiral.” This was a long held theory of mine because I could not understand why a galaxy would spiral.

I think there is a men in black scene, where an alien is rotating the universe globe like a toy they are playing.

From what I remembe of Undergrad physics this isn't actually possible. According to GR, within an event horizon, space-like pths become "time-like" which effecitvely means the singularity is unavoidably "in the future". No matter how big a black hole is, you can't just drift around inside it as literally all paths lead downward (hence even light not escaping)

If you were inside a black hole you wouldn't be able to see light from "deeper" because it wouldn't be able to travel towards you.

This is not what we see within the universe, so I don't think we can be inside a black hole

Off-topic, so I hope not to spark too much side discussion here.

While I agree with your correction and this always bugs me, the common usage of the phrase "begs the question" seems to have become synonymous with "raises the question", as opposed to what I understand to be its former — and perhaps original — meaning which was associated with the informal logical fallacy by the same name.

But the universe isn’t spherical. I’m not sure I understand this hypothesis as explained.

It's not. Rather it's that every observer in the universe is at the center of their own light cone.

The fact that we can not observe anything outside our light cone is well understood.

> If you assume instead that the whole universe has angular momentum, well, where did that come from

Would that be same kind of question as “where did the Big Bang come from?”. That’s a lot of energy that came from somewhere as well seemingly for no good reason.

I also wondered immediately about dark matter; could it be that’s where the counter-balance of momentum went? Like most galaxies spin one way and most dark matter would then have to spin the opposite way.

I am not a physicist so this is all random guessing of course.

Where did the the values of the coupling constants between the various fields come from?

There are many parameters that do not have a reason for their value.

>If you assume instead that the whole universe has angular momentum, well, where did that come from?

You can say the exact same thing about mass. Obviously it came from somewhere. And it could have taken angular momentum with it.

Could it be that the observable universe is one of these stable local pockets and the antimatter to balance it out is simply not observable to us?

Not a physicist either but pair production also occurs in "non extreme" conditions and is still quite common.

If find this question fascinating. Matter can only ever exist with respective anti-matter. Question is where has all the antimatter gone? Are there processes were it does indeed behave different from matter? So where is it? Since a photon and antiphoton are the same and do not absorb each other, we should be able to see it, shouldn't we?

I still want to believe in the antimatter universe where there is some evil twin of mine.

Even if in the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions the baryon number is conserved, there is the interesting fact that for the 8 particle set composed of the 3 kinds of u quarks, 3 kinds of d quarks, 1 electron and 1 neutrino, the sum of all kinds of quantities that are expected to be conserved, like electric charge, color charges and spin sum to zero. This set of 8 particles is also equivalent with the set of the components of one proton, one neutron, one electron and one neutrino.

This property of this set of 8 particles is analogous to the similar property of the set of 2 particles composed of a particle and its anti-particle, and to the similar property of the sets of 4 particles that can be involved in a weak interaction (the intermediate weak bosons convert one 4-particle interaction into a couple of 3-particle interactions, but when looking at the overall inputs and outputs, all the weak interactions are 4-particle interactions), which ensure the conservation of various quantities over such interactions.

This means that it is possible to conceive an additional kind of interaction, which unlike electromagnetic interactions between 2 particles and weak interactions between 4 particles, involves 8 particles, so it has a much smaller probability of occurring, i.e. it is a much weaker interaction than the weak interaction, and through which, when provided with enough energy, quarks + electrons + neutrinos could be generated simultaneously without generating anti-matter.

While there is no evidence yet for such an interaction, it is conceivable that at least during the circumstances of the Big Bang, such an interaction could have existed, so all the quarks and leptons could have been generated from some unknown bosons, just with enough initial energy and with conservation of all quantities for which there are solid reasons to believe that they must always be conserved, like energy, linear momentum, angular momentum, electric charge and color charges. (Unlike for the baryon number, for which there is no other reason to believe that it must be conserved, except that the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions happen to have this behavior.)

Correct, I guess. 40/100 x 1.5 = 60/100. For 1/3 and 2/3 it must have been 100% higher.

Yes, I was arbitrarily defining the side that rotates clockwise as "top" and the other side as "bottom".

Not to disagree with your justified Socratic questioning, but this sparked my interest and I figured I'd share my (novice!) TIL: it appears the IAU uses a coordinate system based on our solar system on January 1st 2000, 00:00 AM, or "J2000.0". Thus (0, 0, 0) is at the ~center of Sol and the x and y are within Earth's orbital plane, which means the z axis is orthogonal to that. In other words, it seems like "above"/"up" in a astronomical sense denotes the same approximate direction as "Northward"/"North", which is pretty fascinating!

Of course as an arrogant computer scientist I think they're downright kooky for not basing it on the galaxy, but ce la vie. Presumably there's one of those too, and this just wins for boring social inertia reasons as much as for any technical ones.

image: https://geoscienceaustralia.github.io/ginan/images/ICRF-75pc...

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

Of course this doesn't really matter for the above musing since top/bottom would purely be conventional based on our viewpoint, but otherwise illuminating on the issue of understanding rotation directions across the universe.

But then on the other side (hemisphere) we'd move the other direction (towards vs away), so wouldn't the opposite effect be expected there, more counterclockwise galaxies?

Then how does linear motion do it?

- "Doppler shift, astronomers expect galaxies rotating opposite to the Milky Way’s motion to appear brighter"

But how does that work?

You are correct, we are indeed at the center of the universe.

Hence the farther we observe stuff, the earlier in time it happens. And if an observer moves to a different location, they will still be at the center of the universe (aka light cone).

If the orientation of galaxies is totally random, we would expect no bias in orientation. If you look at an arbitrary galaxy that's face on to us, it could be rotating either way. And we had no reason to set our prior at anything other than 0.5: why would one direction be more common than the other?

But we observe a bias. Now, that could just be chance — but it's more likely that we've missed something somewhere so our assumption was wrong. One specific possibility is that the universe has an intrinsic spin, which might be because (per the article) we're inside the event horizon of a black hole which is spinning.

Also, yes: we are at the centre of our observable universe.

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

It seems to have caught on, but one could still doubt its applicability to all phenomena at all scales.

That's the thing, we don't know any reason for a preferred spin and assumed it would be equally distributed. So this is an interesting fact.

It's still of great interest to understand why exactly symmetry broke, and how this news might affect the cosmological principle.

This is only obvious when you yourself are not moving on a curved trajectory.

In GR curved trajectories lead to "weird" observations. For instance, I'd expect the side of the remote galaxy that is closer (visually, for you as an observer) to the center of your galaxy to be gravilensed slightly more than the other side. Because the effect is non-linear, it does not just compensate when sides are reversed.

P.S. Not claiming this has any significant effect on the described phenomenon, just that mirror symmetry does not apply.

From my understanding, the big bang requires that the proto-universe was in a completely homogenous state that was then pushed out of that equilibrium for some reason. But that reason doesn't require non-zero angular momentum. It only requires that a the proto-universe was homogenous and now the universe isn't. And that is what separates pre and post big bang. I could be wrong, I am not a cosmologist. Would be happy to hear from one though.

So what caused the "initial kick" to favor one side?