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352 points instagraham | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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keyle ◴[] 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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kmoser ◴[] No.43539557[source]
Dumber question: would a galaxy that appears to spin clockwise appear to spin counter-clockwise when viewed from the other side? Does this imply that the real question is why galaxies' relative orientations seem to favor more spinning in one direction than the other?
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smeej ◴[] No.43540273[source]
This is exactly the dumb question I came here to ask. So now I wait with you for a less dumb person to reply.

My clock certainly seems to tick in the opposite direction when I look at it from behind.

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nuccy ◴[] No.43540475[source]
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

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smeej ◴[] No.43541257[source]
So it makes about as much sense to ask why 2/3rds of the galaxies are "upside-down" from our vantage point, because there's no clear reason it should be something other than 50% in a sample size this large?
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1. jfengel ◴[] No.43542324[source]
Correct. On the largest scales it should be 50-50.

If it's not that would add a significant term to the Big Bang that nobody had previously expected. It would be a rather big deal... if it holds up.