When Lior Shamir, a scientist at Kansas State University, examined images from the James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), he saw something quite unexpected. The majority of the 263 galaxies he observed rotated in the same direction — with two thirds spinning clockwise, Shamir reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Why is this significant? In a random universe, galaxy rotations should be roughly split in two directions. The fact that this doesn’t appear to be the case in our Universe suggests other forces we don’t completely understand may be at play.
“It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations," Shamir said in a press release. "One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole. But if the universe was indeed born rotating it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete.”
The Black Hole Theory
Another surprising aspect of the study was just how obvious the effect appeared. “The paper suggested that one needn’t be an astrophysicist to identify the phenomenon. The difference is so extreme that it can be noticed and inspected even by the unaided human eye,” said the authors in the paper.
"There is no need for special skills or knowledge to see that the numbers are different. With the power of the James Webb Space Telescope, anyone can see it,” Shamir added in the release.
Although the “Universe inside a black hole” theory is tantalizing, there could also be a more pedestrian explanation for the unexpected observations: some earlier measurements of our Universe are incorrect — especially the speed at which the Milky Way galaxy rotates.
Read More: The Oldest Black Hole Could Wreak Havoc on a Faraway Galaxy
A Light Mistake?
Since the Earth rotates around the center of the Milky Way, researchers expect that the Doppler shift effect would effect their observation of the galaxy's speed. That effect occurs when an observer detects waves from a moving object. The most common example of the effect is the way the sound of a train's horn appears to bend as the locomotive thunders past an observer.
Light waves are subject to the same effect, and, in this case could make light coming from galaxies rotating the opposite of the Earth's spin appear brighter. If astronomers have miscalculated the impact of this effect, or just plain gotten the Milky Way's rotational velocity wrong (it’s been considered considerably slower in comparison to other galaxies) they might need to rethink some basic assumptions.
Rethinking the Universe
“If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” Shamir said. "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.”
The bottom line, though, is that both explanations behind the uneven galactic rotations will require that astrophysicists give some aspects of our Universe a rethink.
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The distribution of galaxy rotation in JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey
Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.
