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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: 0.421s | 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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fennecfoxy ◴[31 Mar 25 12:03 UTC] No.43533969[source]▶
That would be super cool to find out! And then it also begs the question, is there something at the center that unites the two poles? If so then what is it!

It would also imply that our whole universe is rotating - the only reason this happens on Earth is because of our planets rotation and the Coriolis effect.

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thunder-blue-3 ◴[31 Mar 25 12:16 UTC] No.43534093[source]▶
I've been following this news for the past couple of weeks-- in essence your statement is what they are hypothesizing, and that the "something at the center that unites the two poles" might be that we are within a black hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology for the curious.
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askonomm ◴[31 Mar 25 12:30 UTC] No.43534210[source]▶
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?
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blueflow ◴[31 Mar 25 12:47 UTC] No.43534378[source]▶
The inner black hole did not come from the outside, it formed inside and if i had to guess, it is stuck in the inside together with all the other matter, unable to interact with the outside of the outer black hole.
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askonomm ◴[31 Mar 25 12:51 UTC] No.43534431[source]▶
Just thinking about this infinite recursion gives me the mental equivalent of a stack overflow.
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jfengel ◴[01 Apr 25 02:53 UTC] No.43542343[source]▶
The trick is that bigger black holes are less dense. Supermassive black holes can have the density of water. If the universe is gravitationally closed, it would have the density of... well, just look up at night. (Actually much less than that; you see more stars because you're inside a galaxy.)

The density makes the scale recursion less mysterious.

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1. drusenko ◴[01 Apr 25 05:56 UTC] No.43543299[source]▶
That’s interesting! When you are referring to density, are you referring to average density within the event horizon? Isn’t most (effectively all) matter concentrated in the singularity? Would love to hear you elaborate on this thought further.
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2. jfengel ◴[01 Apr 25 12:15 UTC] No.43545837[source]▶
We can't really talk about what's inside a black hole. From outside, it has a volume and a mass, and that's all there is to know.

We can say that any particle inside the horizon is inevitably headed to the center. (That's why we can't say any more: no other information can escape.) That does lead to a problem in that all of the mass would be concentrated at a single point at the center, whose density is division-by-zero.

But I wouldn't put too much weight on that. We already know from quantum mechanics that there isn't really any such thing as a "point". The math is still a problem, but the solution almost certainly lies in that direction.