Up, down, round and round

I recall seeing a comic strip a while back making fun of one of the features of Star Trek that doesn't seem ridiculous until you think about it a little.  Have you noticed that whenever two starships are near each other -- whether it's the Enterprise and other Federation ships, or they're being threatened by the Romulans or Klingons or whatnot -- the ships are almost always oriented the same way?  The only time this is not the case is when the showrunner wanted to make it clear that the other ship was disabled and drifting.  Then it was shown at some odd angle relative to the Enterprise.  In the comic strip, it showed what it would look like if all the ships were at random orientations -- how ridiculous it appeared -- but really, isn't that what you'd expect?  In the Star Trek universe, each ship is supposed to come with its own artificial gravity, so within any ship, up is "toward the ceiling" and down is "toward the floor."  It wouldn't need to line up with any other ship's artificial gravity, so except for an occasional coincidence, they should all be at various angles.

In space, there's no preferred direction, no "up" or "down."  You always have to describe position relative to something else -- to the axis of the Earth's rotation, or the plane of the Solar System, or the plane of revolution of the Milky Way.  But even those aren't some kind of universal orientation; as I described in a recent post, the universe is largely isotropic (the same in every direction).  Just like the starships in Star Trek, there shouldn't be any preferred directionality.

Well, that's what we thought.

A new paper this week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society describes a set of data from the James Webb Space Telescope that is absolutely astonishing.  Here's how the authors describe it:

JWST provides a view of the Universe never seen before, and specifically fine details of galaxies in deep space.  JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) is a deep field survey, providing unprecedentedly detailed view of galaxies in the early Universe.  The field is also in relatively close proximity to the Galactic pole.  Analysis of spiral galaxies by their direction of rotation in JADES shows that the number of galaxies in that field that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way galaxy is ∼50 per cent higher than the number of galaxies that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way.  The analysis is done using a computer-aided quantitative method, but the difference is so extreme that it can be noticed and inspected even by the unaided human eye.  These observations are in excellent agreement with deep fields taken at around the same footprint by Hubble Space Telescope and JWST.

This adds a whole new twist (*rimshot*) to the horizon problem and the isotropy of the universe as a whole.  Not only do we have the issue that causally-disconnected regions of the cosmic microwave background radiation, that are too far apart to have ever influenced each other (something I describe more fully in the above-linked post), are way more similar in temperature than you'd expect -- now we have to figure out how causally-disconnected galaxies on opposite sides of the universe could possibly have ended up with correlated rotational axes.

The authors admit it's possible that this measurement is due to something about the Milky Way's own rotation that we're not compensating for in the data, but there's a more out-there explanation that the paper's authors are seriously considering.

"It is not clear what causes this to happen," said study co-author Lior Shamir, of Kansas State University, in an interview with Independent.  "[But] 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."

Black holes are defined by three properties -- mass, electric charge, and... angular momentum.  That we're inside a rotating black hole would explain the anomaly JWST just observed.  Since -- at least as far as our current understanding goes -- anything inside a black hole's event horizon is forever inaccessible, perhaps this means that event horizons are boundaries between universes.  As bizarre as that sounds, there is nothing about what we know of the laws of physics and cosmology that rules that out.  Which would mean that...

... black holes are bigger on the inside.

The Doctor tried to tell us.

Of course, the more prosaic explanation -- that the data were somehow influenced by our own motion through space -- has yet to be decisively ruled out.  I can't help but feel, though, that if the authors thought that was likely, they (or their reviewers) would have suggested waiting and re-analyzing before publishing in a prestigious journal like MNRAS.  The greater likelihood is that this is a real signal, and if so, it's mighty odd.

As far as what it would mean if we found out we are inside a black hole, well -- I'm hardly qualified to weigh in.  It probably wouldn't affect our day-to-day life any.  After all, it's not like we were going to find a way out of the universe anyhow, much as recent events here on Earth have made many of us wish we could.  All I can say is stay alert for further developments, and keep looking up.

Whatever direction that actually is.

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