Is the Universe Spinning?

[n2doc]

Physicists and astronomers have long believed that the universe has mirror symmetry, like a basketball. But recent findings from the University of Michigan suggest that the shape of the Big Bang might be more complicated than previously thought, and that the early universe spun on an axis.

To test for the assumed mirror symmetry, physics professor Michael Longo and a team of five undergraduates catalogued the rotation direction of tens of thousands of spiral galaxies photographed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The mirror image of a counter-clockwise rotating galaxy would have clockwise rotation. More of one type than the other would be evidence for a breakdown of symmetry, or, in physics speak, a parity violation on cosmic scales, Longo said.

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.

more
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/07/-is-the-universe-spinning-new-research-says-yes.html#more

[PoliticAverse]

1. See, I've tried to explain to right-handers that us lefties were correct... n/t

[Speck Tater]

2. I wonder...

Astrophysicists claim there is some kind of unknown "dark energy" that is causing the universe to expand at an increasing rate. Maybe it's just centrifugal force. Wouldn't a spinning universe cause the matter to tend to fly out away from the center like marbles on a spinning turntable?

[MilesColtrane]

3. We see every galaxy moving away from us no matter which direction we look.

If this were due to centrifugal force, that would mean the the Earth occupies the exact position in the universe where the Big Bang happened.

I find that highly unlikely, to say the least.

[Speck Tater]

4. Thought experiment...

imagine yourself on a huge, flat carrousel. The surface is frictionless, and you share the carrousel with a hundred other people. The carrousel is large enough that you can't see the rim, and cannot infer from it the location of the center of rotation.

No matter where you sit on the carrousel everyone else will be moving away from you. Everyone is accelerating toward the distant rim, and as a consequence, those 100 people, you included, are spreading out into a larger surface area of the carrousel. We are so distant from the center that we cannot see the people opposite us, and cannot notice that they are accelerating, relative to our frame, faster than our nearer neighbors.

I think that if the center is distant enough to be unobservable, and if the rim is distant enough to be unobservable, the expansion will appear uniform in all directions, just a being in the middle of the ocean, the surface of the earth seems flat in all directions. What we take to be isotropy may, in fact, be anisotropic at a level below our ability to measure because we can only see a very small portion of the entire spinning universe.

Or, the axis of rotation might be in a higher spatial dimension so that our three visible dimensions are all perpendicular to the spin axis, resulting in centripetal acceleration in all three spatial dimensions.

[MilesColtrane]

5. "Or, the axis of rotation might be in a higher spatial dimension..."

Not knowing anything about multi-dimensional geometry or physics, I can't say whether that holds any water.

It still seems to me that if the rotation is along an axis then galaxies aligned with us along a parallel to that axis ("above" and "below" us) would display almost no red shift.

[Speck Tater]

8. Hmmm. You're right. Oh well, back to the drawing board. nt

[MilesColtrane]

11. The merry go round analogy was an interesting way of thinking about relative motion.

After reading a bit, I think we're both misinterpreting the commonly accepted model of the cosmos.

Hubble's Law states that every distant red-shifted galaxy is moving away from every other. In other words, we would see the same thing no matter where we were in the universe.

The universe isn't expanding in to anything. Space itself is expanding.

Imagine a number of dots on the surface of a balloon. As you inflate the balloon, all the dots move away from each other.

This stuff fascinates me. Too bad I hit the ceiling of my ability to understand mathematics in high school calculus. (I barely passed.)

[Speck Tater]

13. Seems that stuff as fundamental as "space" and "time" should be easy to understand.

But instead I get headaches and dizzy spells when I try to think too deeply about them :)

On further reflection, if the axis of rotation were in a fourth spatial dimension then the acceleration would be away from the center in ALL lower dimensions. And if it's space itself that is stretching, well maybe that stretching is being caused by the spin.

Who knows? But it's fun to think about anyway.

[Bigmack]

24. Oh my god, a KINDRED soul!

I LOVE this stuff, but my career as a physicist was ended by my "D" in calculus.....that I worked harder for than ANY "A" I got in ANYTHING else! Ms Bigmack

[Ian David]

23. Do we get cotton candy after the carrousel? n/t

[bananas]

15. The Earth does occupy the exact position in the universe where the Big Bang happened.

Think about it.

[derby378]

19. How so?

Our universe, when born 13.7 billion years ago, expanded into - well, "something." What this "something" is, we may not live long enough to find out, but the idea of an expanding universe implies the existence of a "space beyond space" that our universe occupies.

This naturally leads to discussions of M-theory, and speculations on dark flow and the WMAP Cold Spot, but I'll just let it rest for now.

[laconicsax]

20. Hooray for geocentrism!

Pope Urban VIII would be so proud!

[mopinko]

7. centripetal force

this force is a left handed (iirc from college physics) perpendicular force to centrifugal force. might explain the left handed preference.

[qazplm]

6. can an infintie universe

spin on its axis?

Doesn't that suggest a finite universe?

[Speck Tater]

9. If the spin was rigid, then yes. The angular velocity at the (infinite) rim would be infinite. nt

[WheelWalker]

10. Not the Universe; Mind is spinning.

[DetlefK]

12. Ridiculous.

They found an excess of 7%. Fine.
They measured the northern hemisphere, up to a depth of 600 million light years. Fine.

Problems:
- There is also a southern hemisphere.
- The event horizon of our universe has a diameter of about 3x 13.5 billion light years. (Leaving disconnected mini-universes/Linde bubbles out of my example for the sake of simplicity.)

=> The part of the universe they have not yet been looking at is almost 77,000 times bigger than the sector they have measured.

[gristy]

14. Perhaps they are figuring that the universe is isotropic at that scale

and that the 7% excess for the region they measured is statistically significant.

[Iggo]

16. Spinning in what?

[Thor_MN]

17. Depends, is there a 2 for 1 deal at the bar?

[gtar100]

18. Heck, why not. Everything else seems to be

in one way or another.

[lumberjack_jeff]

21. spin relative to what? n/t

[Ian David]

22. I asked that question in 7th grade, but nobody could give me a good answer. n/t