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81 points janandonly | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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fprog ◴[] No.43372696[source]
An alternate hypothesis which seems equally interesting, albeit for different reasons, is at the end of the article:

> Another explanation for why the JWST may have seen an overrepresentation of galaxies rotating in one direction is that the Milky Way's own rotation could have caused it.

> Previously, scientists had considered the speed of our galaxy's rotation to be too slow to have a non-negligible impact on observations made by the JWST.

> “If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," Shamir concluded. "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."

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perihelions ◴[] No.43372859[source]
I'm utterly confused what's going on. They're measuring galaxies' rotations by looking at images of the subset that are spiral galaxies, and checking which direction the arms spiral. They describe their image processing algorithm in their paper [0]. (it's around figure 3)

How can local movement of stars within the Milky Way affect which way spiral galaxy arms are pointing?

[0] https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798.

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Mertax ◴[] No.43372933[source]
There is no absolute direction for a galaxy’s spin—it’s always relative to the observer’s perspective.

So I’d suspect they’re saying time and distance would need to be factored in rather than just looking at static images relative to our position today since our own spin may have caused a particular galaxy to appear to have been spinning in a different direction at another point in space-time

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tremon ◴[] No.43373010[source]
I don't understand this logic. To me, that's equivalent to saying "there's no absolute direction for which way a wheel spins, it's relative to the speed of the observer". Which makes no sense to me, because my definition of spin is measured against the axis of rotation of the object itself.

I don't see how time-intermittent frame captures from our own position affect that interpretation. Or are we using an astonomy-specific definition of spin here?

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1. doug-moen ◴[] No.43373468{3}[source]
It's true, there is no absolute direction for which way a wheel spins. It's relative to the observer.

If you are standing on the side of a road, and a bicycle goes by, then you may observe the wheels to rotate clockwise, while an observer on the other side of the road will observe the same wheels to rotate counter-clockwise.

The sun is said to rotate around the centre of the milky way galaxy once every 225 million years. Over that time frame, some of the galaxies we observe will flip between clockwise and counterclockwise rotation as our viewpoint changes.

But that isn't relevant here. The Space article is too vague and handwavy to make any conclusions about the research, and should be ignored. Only the original scientific paper is worth reading: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798?logi...

Section 5.2 "Physics of Galaxy Rotation" seems particularly relevant.

> due to the Doppler shift effect galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way are expected to be slightly brighter than galaxies that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way. Therefore, more galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way are expected to be observed from Earth, and the difference should peak at around the Galactic pole. That observation is conceptually aligned with the empirical data of Fig. 10, and the observation using JADES described in Section 3.

You should read the paper for the full argument.