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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Out of line

Every so often, I run into a claim that some archaeological site aligns with a particular astronomical object, and all too often, everyone decides that the alignment is why the site was built where and how it was.

Trying to parse the motives of long-dead people who left nothing in the way of written records is a dicey business.  In fact, sometimes it's hard enough even when you're talking about extant cultures.  This was brilliantly lampooned in Horace Miner's rightly famous 1956 article "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," which appeared in American Anthropologist, and took a rigorous and scholarly look at the mysterious "shrines" we all have in our houses...

... better known as "bathrooms."  And, of course, reached the wrong conclusions about the purposes of nearly everything in them.

The problem arises because the human brain is a pattern-finding device, so it's often hard to resist our tendency to see a pattern when there is none there.  This is the origin of the phenomenon of ley lines -- which I wrote about twelve years ago, in one of my earliest Skeptophilia posts -- the claim that towns, cities, and religious sites are laid out along "lines of power" generated by some unknown forces in the Earth itself.  There are a couple of completely prosaic reasons this alignment happens:

1. Populated sites in areas with relatively flat topography are frequently connected by straight lines, because as Papa Euclid taught us, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
2. More interestingly -- and germane to the pattern-finding tendency referenced above -- if you aren't given any constraints about what particular places you're trying to connect, you can almost always find completely accidental correlations that look like deliberate alignment.

The latter is why the whole topic comes up, because of a fun site I stumbled on called Spurious Alignments: Bad Archaeoastronomy At Your Fingertips.  What this site does is allow you to overlay various astronomical benchmarks (e.g. sunrise on the Winter Solstice, the northernmost point on the horizon where Jupiter rises, and so on) on top of particular geographic locations -- and see what correlations you can find.

One of the best ones anyone's found so far is the airport in Palermo, Italy.  Here are a few of the relevant discoveries:

• Runway 07/25 tracks the relative motions of the Moon.
• Runway 02/20 aligns with the rise of the star Capella.
• Taxiways Bravo and Charlie align with the setting of the star Procyon.
• Taxiway Delta points directly toward the setting of the star Arcturus.

From this, we can clearly see that the Palermo Airport is a site built by ancient astronomers, and the whole complex is an observatory, or possibly the center of a sky-worshiping cult.

The difficulty, of course, is some sites were created because of astronomical alignments.  Many of our distant ancestors knew the motions of the skies better than your average person does today.  A good example, not really explainable any other way, is the famous Sun Dagger on Fajade Butte in New Mexico.  A spiral design carved into the side of a rock facing is across from a crack between two stones, and -- only on the Summer Solstice -- this crack allows light from the Sun at midday to form a "dagger" that perfectly bisects the spiral.

The Sun Dagger is pretty clearly a solstice marker, allowing people to keep track of the seasons in a climate that was hostile to say the least.

But as for most of the other "ancient astronomical observatory" claims -- well, maybe.  It's too easy to find spurious correlations and alignments, especially when there are no rules about what you're trying to get the site to align to.

Or, maybe, the people who built the Palermo Airport really were trying to tell us something.  You never know.

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