A researcher has made a puzzling discovery while analyzing observations taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
While analyzing images for the telescope’s Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), Kansas State University associate professor of computer science Lior Shamir found that out of the 263 galaxies examined, two thirds of them rotated clockwise, while only a third rotated counterclockwise, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
This challenges the assumption that any given universe would have half of them spinning one way, with the rest spinning counter to that, according to a press release about the discovery.
“It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations,” said Shamir in a statement. “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.”
The findings add credence to an existing, Russian doll-like theory called “Schwarzschild cosmology,” which suggests that our galaxy is trapped within a black hole, which in turn is located inside another universe.
As Space.com reports, this would imply that other observed black holes could be wormholes, otherwise known as Einstein-Rosen bridges, to other universes, which are unobservable to us due to the black holes trapping light within them.
“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 the theory that we’re surrounded by doorways to other universes and wasn’t involved in the research, 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.”
“The discovery by the JWST that galaxies rotate in a preferred direction would support the theory of black holes creating new universes, and I would be extremely excited if these findings are confirmed,” he added.
But Shamir’s findings still leave the possibility that the Milky Way’s own rotation could have influenced the galaxies’ unusual distribution of spin rotation.
Since the Earth rotates around the center of the Milky Way, researchers expect light from galaxies rotating in the opposite direction to be brighter, causing the discrepancy in the JADES observations, Shamir suggests.
In other words, the velocity at which the Milky Way rotates may be influencing our celestial measurements, which had previously been considered negligible.
“If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” he said in the statement. “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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