Spiral
galaxies have revealed a clue about the early universe
NASA,
ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
Egads!
Well, at least this shows you don’t have to have a correct theory to come up
with useful data. These 200,000 observations show about half of the spirals
rotating clockwise (CW) and half rotating counter clockwise (CCW). Of course,
microcosms rotate after interacting with their macrocosms in a special way:
shear. Shear occurs when one thing moves in the opposite direction as another
thing. That’s what we observe when landslides and earthquakes occur. When both
sides of the shear plane are not fixed, countervailing rotations occur. You can
prove this yourself by rotating one spherical object in contact with another. A
CW in one will produce a CCW in the other.
The
point of all this is that a microcosm cannot begin to rotate in isolation—least
of all in a finite universe surrounded by empty space. Like much of cosmogony,
the title to this piece is quite absurd. Do these folks really think the
universe could spin willy-nilly in opposite directions at different times? The
change in direction would be as miraculous as their imagined explosion of the
entire universe out of nothing. And do they really think that would have any
influence on spiral galaxy rotation?
Now
for the useful stuff:
1. Again, the finding that half
were CW and half CCW is more or less what we would expect for the Infinite
Universe. They mention a 2% variation. That is quite uniform for a universe
that is infinite and imperfect.
2. The variation appears greater
for distant galaxies than for nearby galaxies. This is as it
should be. Measurements farther away are going to be more difficult than those
nearby. The plus or minus variation should increase with distance.
3. Observations from the poles
found a couple percent more CCW than CW; from the equator, there were more CW
than CCW. This is probably an artefact of the location of measurement.
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