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James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise

(www.smithsonianmag.com)
352 points instagraham | 2 comments | 31 Mar 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.467s | source
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keyle ◴[31 Mar 25 10:59 UTC] No.43533500[source]▶
Potentially a very dumb question, but seeing the difference between cyclones and hurricane on earth (clock-wise, anti-clock-wise)...

Does it mean that we are, potentially, on one of two poles(?) of the observable universe, if we're observing most galaxies around us rotating a certain way?

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peterburkimsher ◴[31 Mar 25 20:14 UTC] No.43539378[source]▶
We're in the centre of the observable universe.

The observable universe is the only true sphere.

The observable universe is expanding into the unobservable universe.

What would be interesting is to run a diff on the cosmic microwave background and the pictures from the James Webb space telescope to figure out where the true centre of the universe is, and derive the poles from there.

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jenadine ◴[31 Mar 25 20:21 UTC] No.43539479[source]▶
> The observable universe is expanding into the unobservable universe.

Is that so? My understanding is that it doesn't expend into something. And that it expend so fast that the edge of it becomes unobservable.

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peterburkimsher ◴[31 Mar 25 20:40 UTC] No.43539712[source]▶
Space and time are related, and expanding rapidly since the Big Bang (though there was a time in the early universe when the expansion rate was faster).

https://cds.cern.ch/images/CERN-HOMEWEB-PHO-2022-023-1

Observing the edge is effectively looking back in time, to see the conditions of the universe closer to the time of the Big Bang.

New telescopes keep expanding that edge, and new particle colliders (such as those at CERN or Fermilab) keep "bashing 2 rocks together to make fire" - recreating the conditions of the Big Bang to see what comes off.

What I'm not sure about is whether the speed of light (assumed to be constant) is correlated with the size of the observable universe. Perhaps a physicist could shed some light on that question. Relativity means that galaxies that are moving at the speed of light away from one another (one travelling at c, another travelling at -c) have a relative velocity of higher than the speed of light (|c| + |-c| = 2c).

There's also the theory of the One Electron Universe, which I quite like (though that reveals my bias as an electronic systems engineer). Perhaps what we see is the One photon universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

Hopefully this rambling makes sense to someone!

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1. ck2 ◴[31 Mar 25 21:11 UTC] No.43540013[source]▶
Wait, I get space expanding and accelerating.

I never considered time expanding (and accelerating?).

Is that even possible? What does that imply?

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2. peterburkimsher ◴[31 Mar 25 22:40 UTC] No.43540735[source]▶
Finding a way to reverse the expansion of the universe would imply time travel being possible. It hasn't happened yet, but perhaps that's just a technological limitation. And if you ask my Mac, then Time Machine is very much possible - that's just the name of the backup system.

The question starts to become very philosophical if there is a backup system for this universe. Everything being saved, for eternity, in infinite time. It would require very advanced computational power and storage, but it would probably work in binary (but that's just the kind of thing a computer engineer would say).

Maybe, though, the observable universe is rotating clockwise around a centre that is in the unobservable universe, and time is just a measure of how many rotations have been made since the Big Bang.