James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rotate Clockwise

Re:James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rot... by xeornet on Monday March 31, 2025 @03:59PM (#43539189)

Sorry if it's a dumb question, by why would we expect an equal number? Doesn't that assume that we consider ourselves at the centre of our observable universe?

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Re:James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rot... by schoen on Monday March 31, 2025 @04:00PM (#43539199)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle

It seems to have caught on, but one could still doubt its applicability to all phenomena at all scales.

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Re:James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rot... by andrewaylett on Tuesday April 01, 2025 @05:31AM (#43544676)

If the orientation of galaxies is totally random, we would expect no bias in orientation. If you look at an arbitrary galaxy that's face on to us, it could be rotating either way. And we had no reason to set our prior at anything other than 0.5: why would one direction be more common than the other?

But we observe a bias. Now, that could just be chance — but it's more likely that we've missed something somewhere so our assumption was wrong. One specific possibility is that the universe has an intrinsic spin, which might be because (per the article) we're inside the event horizon of a black hole which is spinning.

Also, yes: we are at the centre of our observable universe.

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