Monday, October 17, 2011

Original spin: Was the universe born whirling? - space - 17 October 2011 - New Scientist

Original spin: Was the universe born whirling?: All other things being equal, you would have expected these galaxies generally to be spinning in random directions, according to local conditions when they formed. And that indeed was the case. In most sectors of the northern sky, equal numbers of galaxies were rotating to the right, or clockwise, and to the left, anticlockwise. But along one direction, at about 10 degrees to our own galaxy's spin axis, there were more left-handed spirals than right-handed ones...
"If this asymmetry is real, it means the universe has a net angular momentum..."
It is too early for him to have incorporated the details of the galaxy asymmetry into his work explicitly, but he sees a suggestive thread: an initially spinning universe brought on a parity-violating asymmetry in gravity that allowed matter to triumph over its antimatter rival. And that process left two marks behind: the axis of evil in the cosmic background radiation, and the inconspicuous alignment of galaxies that Longo has spotted.

1 comment:

  1. Gödel discussed a rotating universe in a solution to the Einstein equations he published in 1949 (the "Gödel metric", as it's come to be known).

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