An alternate hypothesis which seems equally interesting, albeit for different reasons, is at the end of the article:
> Another explanation for why the JWST may have seen an overrepresentation of galaxies rotating in one direction is that the Milky Way's own rotation could have caused it.
> Previously, scientists had considered the speed of our galaxy's rotation to be too slow to have a non-negligible impact on observations made by the JWST.
> “If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," Shamir concluded. "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."
I'm utterly confused what's going on. They're measuring galaxies' rotations by looking at images of the subset that are spiral galaxies, and checking which direction the arms spiral. They describe their image processing algorithm in their paper [0]. (it's around figure 3)
How can local movement of stars within the Milky Way affect which way spiral galaxy arms are pointing?
You cannot decide galaxy rotation by looking at it. Consider this gallaxy:
_______
\ _ B\
/ /_\ \
\ \_/ \
\A____ /
\/
Is A side closer to us, or is B side closer to us? You can't tell by just looking at it, if the B is closer that we are seeing bottom of the galaxy and it rotates CW. If A is closer than we are seing top of the gallaxy and it rotates CCW.
There is no absolute direction for a galaxy’s spin—it’s always relative to the observer’s perspective.
So I’d suspect they’re saying time and distance would need to be factored in rather than just looking at static images relative to our position today since our own spin may have caused a particular galaxy to appear to have been spinning in a different direction at another point in space-time
This is the simpler explanation. Or they need better measurements. The black hole theories are more “fun” but not logically consistent and there’s no shred of evidence beyond science fiction level ideas
This newsblog takes one piece of the paper [1] and blows it up like it's the most obvious thing ever and completely hand-waves away the alternative, while the paper itself actually provides some compelling evidence for the alternative explanation: This asymmetry is because of our own galaxy's rotation. It would be an insane coincidence to have the large scale structure of our universe be more asymmetric towards the poles of our galactic plane and the further you go away from our galaxy (especially when velocity blue shifts would obviously make one type of rotation for galaxies more visible in the high-z regime where JWST primarily looked). Forget black hole cosmology, if you believe what this article suggests, then special relativity itself may be wrong. The data is pretty sound and perfectly in line with earlier observations that found no asymmetry if you believe our own galaxy's rotation is the culprit. So if I had to bet, I'd say we misunderstood galaxies and not the universe as a whole. Mostly because galactic physics is incredibly complicated and has very whimsical empirics, whereas we have some really solid theories and data on the universe as a whole.
Thanks for link. Amazing work. I'm less than noob, so barely comprehend this topic, much less this paper.
ELI5: Per "5.2 Physics of Galaxy Rotation", could the Milky Way's relative movement, in addition to its spin, also effect the observed assymetry? In Figure 10, is the Milky Way also moving toward the blue and away from the red?
Thanks for humouring my question. Everything about astronomy and JWST just blows my mind. Like how Figure 10 sorta resembles yinyang. What a time to be alive.
> These [baby] universes would be unobservable to us because they are also behind an event horizon, a one-way light-trapping point of no return from which light cannot escape, meaning information can never travel from the interior of a black hole to an external observer.
Also meaning that “our” blackhole (the one containing us) is unobservable from the parent universe for the same reason. So where is all this extra light/energy going in our universe? Should we not have detected an increase of energy in our universe?
I figure our whole universe so far has existed in the first nanosecond (or whatever) after the creation of the black hole in the parent universe, so very little energy or light has had time to enter.
By one or two seconds in the parent universe’s time scale, our universe will have settled down to its extremely long state of being a cold, dark void of slowly decomposing subatomic particles.
Scales are a very interesting thing to think about. There's a theory that the universe didn't really 'start' with the big bang, that it was always there, but at a different scale. The big bang was essentially an increase in the scale of the universe, possibly in terms of time and space.
(Complete hypothesizing from a very cursory understanding.)
Perhaps that's dark energy or vacuum energy? If mass and time truly switches places when crossing into a black hole, it would make sense that the spacetime size of this universe translates into observable mass outside it. Which might tie it to the expansion of the universe.
It'd be neat if the universe were essentially a nested Russian doll of black holes. Our universe is a black hole with black holes inside and black holes inside them and so on, and the larger universe outside ours is also an even bigger black hole. Some of the really huge black holes in our universe might be big enough to host interesting things within, but the smaller ones probably just contain "toy" universes without much happening.
I recall reading about our universe as a black hole once -- one thing posited is that everything that is happening and what we think of as space is really information processing occurring just at the surface of the event horizon. There was some possible way of explaining non-local phenomena like entanglement that way, but I forget the details.
It's fascinating to think about how the actual universe might be something quite alien from our ordinary perception. It's not that our ordinary perception is wrong. What we're perceiving is just one perspective on something much larger and weirder. In this case our perspective would be from within this information substrate. It's almost universe-as-simulation, except that the simulation does not have a builder. It's a naturally occurring phenomenon. The Matrix has no architect, or if it does it's something fully outside the event horizon of this object and thus un-observable.
Of course at this point we're well into physicists smoking pot territory.
at the bottom of the article the mundane hypothesis is presented that the measurement seen by JWST might be a calibration error caused by the rotation of the Milky Way making it appear that other galaxies have a preferred rotation.
sadly, this is likely the real explanation, but that's not very exciting
How does this work with matter falling into 'our' black hole and hawkins-radiation leaving our black hole?
Heck, Hawkins radiation means black holes can evaporate. Does that correspond to a universa collapsing?
Would matter falling into our black hole come shooting out of the white-hole we see?
Would time on either side of the event horizon even be related?
It would need to be the other way around, dark energy being matter falling into our black hole. Hawking radiation should 'suck' energy out of our universe. I can't think of a satisfying source of this energy.
The best I can imagine is either space contracting (but that is gravity) or entropy increasing (but that doesn't leak energy, just free energy).
> How does this work with matter falling into 'our' black hole and hawkins-radiation leaving our black hole?
We would see that at the edge (if we could see it) there's new mass and energy, but that would be obscured by what appears as the CMB for us.
> Heck, Hawkins radiation means black holes can evaporate. Does that correspond to a universa collapsing?
No, it corresponds to stuff disappearing from our universe, until someday nothing is left.
> Would matter falling into our black hole come shooting out of the white-hole we see?
We'd see it as being part of the Big Bang, behind the CMB, so we wouldn't see it.
> Would time on either side of the event horizon even be related?
Er, not in any way that we could observe, so it's not a question we could answer. But we could receive information from the outside, except that the CMB would hide it from our prying eyes.
Hawking radiation can't just be stuff dissapearing, because the actual singularity can dissolve. Besides, where would the stuff even leave from? I could imagine the mass flux through our event horizon being related to the energy driving space expansion (or contraction). That only makes sense if time on the inside is related to time on the outside though.
The idea that any mass that will ever fall into our black hole all simultaneously appeared at the big bang doesn't feel correct. That suggests a very specific relationship between time on the inside and outside. There are at least two moments that are distuinishable on both sides. The singularity appearing, and the singularity dissapearing. Compressing all time on the outside into the big bang means weird things for the timing of when the singularity dissapears.
> Would time on either side of the event horizon even be related?
I think that's exactly the right question to ask. And ask it for space too. Perhaps the entire history of the interior universe unfolds between the black hole's formation and its final evaporation. Perhaps a heat death of the interior universe, where everything spreads out until nothing interesting is left, can fit inside this ever shrinking volume.
Readit News
> Another explanation for why the JWST may have seen an overrepresentation of galaxies rotating in one direction is that the Milky Way's own rotation could have caused it.
> Previously, scientists had considered the speed of our galaxy's rotation to be too slow to have a non-negligible impact on observations made by the JWST.
> “If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," Shamir concluded. "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."
How can local movement of stars within the Milky Way affect which way spiral galaxy arms are pointing?
[0] https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798.
So I’d suspect they’re saying time and distance would need to be factored in rather than just looking at static images relative to our position today since our own spin may have caused a particular galaxy to appear to have been spinning in a different direction at another point in space-time
[1] https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798
ELI5: Per "5.2 Physics of Galaxy Rotation", could the Milky Way's relative movement, in addition to its spin, also effect the observed assymetry? In Figure 10, is the Milky Way also moving toward the blue and away from the red?
Thanks for humouring my question. Everything about astronomy and JWST just blows my mind. Like how Figure 10 sorta resembles yinyang. What a time to be alive.
Also meaning that “our” blackhole (the one containing us) is unobservable from the parent universe for the same reason. So where is all this extra light/energy going in our universe? Should we not have detected an increase of energy in our universe?
By one or two seconds in the parent universe’s time scale, our universe will have settled down to its extremely long state of being a cold, dark void of slowly decomposing subatomic particles.
No good reason to think this, just feels right.
Perhaps that's dark energy or vacuum energy? If mass and time truly switches places when crossing into a black hole, it would make sense that the spacetime size of this universe translates into observable mass outside it. Which might tie it to the expansion of the universe.
What do you mean by that?
I recall reading about our universe as a black hole once -- one thing posited is that everything that is happening and what we think of as space is really information processing occurring just at the surface of the event horizon. There was some possible way of explaining non-local phenomena like entanglement that way, but I forget the details.
It's fascinating to think about how the actual universe might be something quite alien from our ordinary perception. It's not that our ordinary perception is wrong. What we're perceiving is just one perspective on something much larger and weirder. In this case our perspective would be from within this information substrate. It's almost universe-as-simulation, except that the simulation does not have a builder. It's a naturally occurring phenomenon. The Matrix has no architect, or if it does it's something fully outside the event horizon of this object and thus un-observable.
Of course at this point we're well into physicists smoking pot territory.
sadly, this is likely the real explanation, but that's not very exciting
Would matter falling into our black hole come shooting out of the white-hole we see?
Would time on either side of the event horizon even be related?
Something to consider is a possible time scale difference. Eg time could be dilated for us for being around so much density.
We would see that at the edge (if we could see it) there's new mass and energy, but that would be obscured by what appears as the CMB for us.
> Heck, Hawkins radiation means black holes can evaporate. Does that correspond to a universa collapsing?
No, it corresponds to stuff disappearing from our universe, until someday nothing is left.
> Would matter falling into our black hole come shooting out of the white-hole we see?
We'd see it as being part of the Big Bang, behind the CMB, so we wouldn't see it.
> Would time on either side of the event horizon even be related?
Er, not in any way that we could observe, so it's not a question we could answer. But we could receive information from the outside, except that the CMB would hide it from our prying eyes.
The idea that any mass that will ever fall into our black hole all simultaneously appeared at the big bang doesn't feel correct. That suggests a very specific relationship between time on the inside and outside. There are at least two moments that are distuinishable on both sides. The singularity appearing, and the singularity dissapearing. Compressing all time on the outside into the big bang means weird things for the timing of when the singularity dissapears.
I think that's exactly the right question to ask. And ask it for space too. Perhaps the entire history of the interior universe unfolds between the black hole's formation and its final evaporation. Perhaps a heat death of the interior universe, where everything spreads out until nothing interesting is left, can fit inside this ever shrinking volume.
It's got a lot of ads, traffic arbitrage, floating unrelated videos and even back jacking...
To cross her course
Are swallowed by
A fearsome force
Through the void
To be destroyed
Or is there something more?
Atomized — at the core
Or through the Astral Door —
To soar…"
https://www.rush.com/songs/cygnus-x-1-book-one-the-voyage/