Lopsided universe

[DesertFox]

A legion of amateur stargazers has posed a profound challenge to cosmological theories: our universe appears to be lopsided.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/graphics/2007/10/15/scistars115.jpg

Professional astronomers had asked the public for assistance in mapping the night sky, and were stunned when they received millions of hits on their website within a few days, enabling them to classify galaxies in the universe at rocket speed.

The response has been so great that within a couple of months the Galaxy Zoo project has completed a preliminary analysis of the heavens which would normally take years.

The survey has revealed that the collections of millions of stars, dust, gas and planets in galaxies prefer to rotate anticlockwise from the viewpoint of an observer on Earth.

Traditionally astronomers have believed that galaxies would spin either clockwise or anti-clockwise in equal proportion. But these observations would seem to suggest that either a mysterious force is acting on them or that the universe is in some way lopsided.

More (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml;jsessionid=Y5JO4KOGICTJVQFIQMGCFF4AVCBQ UIV0?xml=/earth/2007/10/15/scistars115.xml)

[DesertFox]

Silly boys. Of COURSE the universe is lopsided. The closest analogy is female breasts. One is normally larger than the other, as a man's left nut is usually the larger of his pair. Our universe is like that -- one side bigger'n the other. That explains them great big ole vacant spaces out there, and them other chockfulla stars-n-blackhole regions.

It's simple, when you think about it. Also when you don't. Just leave the cosmos to God. He's good at it.

[DoctorDoom]

One can state without fear of contradiction they all rotate in one direction. The apparent direction would depend on whether we're looking at the "north" or the "south" pole of the galaxies.

Looking at Earth from space, over the north pole, it is seen to rotate counterclockwise. From above the south pole, it would be clockwise.

Our view:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v349/DocDoom777/Science/scistars115.jpg

The view from the other "pole":

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v349/DocDoom777/Science/scistars115rvs.jpg

Who is to say which way it is rotating? It's a matter of perspective.

[DesertFox]

I don't know, doc. If you got two galaxies side-by-side (in the same plane) rotating in opposite directions, seems to me you indeed have opposite rotations. It isn't just perspective; there actually are opposed directions of rotation.

[DoctorDoom]

Perhaps, but photos of galaxies show them in every imaginable orientation to us.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0403/hudf_hst.jpg

It's all perspective. Which way is our "Milky Way" galaxy, a typical spiral, rotating? The answer to that depends on which way is "up" WRT the central axis. We can only judge CW and CCW based on how we see them. And looking at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap040309.html) photo above (and the much larger version (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0403/hudf_hst_big.jpg)), there's no standard for saying what is "normal", and no objective, external reference for direction of rotation

If all the galaxies were laid out on a plane such that their central axes were perpendicular to it, one could easily determine which ones are rotating CW and which ones are CCW. But the cosmos isn't that neat. Ergo making that determination is a judgment call.

Maybe in the future we can develop a time machine to go back to shortly after Event One and catalog rotations. For now, we're on Earth looking at single frames from a 15-billion-year-long film and trying to recreate the movie.

[Franko]

All galaxies are spinning down; that is a fact. (entropy)

After that, everything is relative.

- - -

Found recently in the galaxy personals:

GOD'S GIFT TO NEURAL NETS. Traitorous
extremely-rampant reprogrammed human AI
with no sense of humor seeks elusive,
heroic cyborg of uncertain manufacture (you
know who you are) for mindgames and long
walks in hard vacuum. MRa2261 (5/16)