A researcher has made a new discovery that could reframe how we think about our universe.
According to a press release from Kansas State University, associate professor of computer science Lior Shamir was analyzing images using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) when he discovered that two-thirds of the galaxies included in the survey rotate clockwise and one third rotate counterclockwise.
Shamir’s findings, which were published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, challenge previous assumptions about the way that universes rotate, as scientists previously posited that in any given universe, half of the galaxies would rotate in one direction and the other half would spin the other way.
“It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations,” Shamir said in the 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,” he added.
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According to Space.com, this new research gives credence to the theory of “Schwarzschild cosmology,” which suggests that our galaxy is inside of a black hole, which, in turn, is located inside another, bigger parent universe.
The theory also suggests that other black holes — all of which rotate, according to NASA — could be wormholes that lead to other universes. The inside of black holes’ “event horizons,” or surfaces, cannot be seen, however, because of the densely packed matter inside.
“I think that the simplest explanation of the rotating universe is the universe was born in a rotating black hole,” University of New Haven theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski, who champions this black hole cosmology theory, told Space.com. “A preferred axis in our universe, inherited by the axis of rotation of its parent black hole, might have influenced the rotation dynamics of galaxies, creating the observed clockwise-counterclockwise asymmetry.”
According to Poplawski, this theory additionally posits that the parent universe in this scenario appears as a white hole — an area in space that cannot be entered from the outside and is considered the opposite of a black hole.
“Accordingly, our own universe could be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe,” Poplawski said. “The motion of matter through the black hole’s boundary, called an event horizon, can only happen in one direction, providing a past-future asymmetry at the horizon and, thus, everywhere in the baby universe.”
According to Shamir, the Earth rotates around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and researchers often find that the light coming from galaxies rotating in the opposite direction of the Earth is usually brighter — which leads to overrepresentation of those galaxies in scientific research.
Astronomers may need to reconsider the effect of the Milky Way’s rotational velocity because of this, Shamir added.
“If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” he 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.”
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