James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise

Posted by instagraham 3/31/2025

James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise(www.smithsonianmag.com)

356 points | 310 commentspage 4

jiggawatts 3/31/2025|

They analysed only a small patch of sky, which could have a local relative rotation compared to our region of space.

Real science will be when they survey the entire sky, with many small deep-field images.

smath 3/31/2025||

Several folks here have recognized that the spin direction depends on whether you look at the plane of the galaxy from ‘above’ or ‘below’. One thing I didn’t see in the article is how the two types of galaxies are distributed across the 3D spherical coordinates when viewed from the earth (or rather from the JWST).

Im thinking: what if there are a bunch of massive objects like black holes in certain directions that are causing the light to bend in a certain way. So what would normally be light coming from the top of the galaxy plane, is actually light reaching us from the bottom of that plane. Would this slew the distribution of the spin one way - I don’t know.

stainablesteel 3/31/2025||

so i guess the underlying assumption is that this looks out from out perspective in a single static orientation, because this says nothing to me about their orientation which i think is what they're trying to convey by saying clockwise?

or i suppose this is clockwise/counterclockwise in regards to the direction they're moving in?

2/3 doesn't seem that significant if they think it should be a 50/50 split, we might just not be seeing enough

pushreply 3/31/2025||

So, there is a visible order about this matter. That they are "rotating", instead of, for example, "Z-Pattern" movement. Amazing.

mbac32768 4/1/2025||

Should we expect the big bang to have been completely symmetrical? If not, wouldn't most galaxies spin one way versus the other?

seydor 3/31/2025||

Does it need to be that the whole universe started with rotation, or that our visible part of the universe has a common ancestor?

RobertRoberts 3/31/2025||

Everything turns clockwise from a specific perspective... that's what is interesting here, perspective and consistency.

nottorp 4/1/2025||

So do the galaxies rotate clockwise, or did we make clocks that rotate in the direction the galaxies choose? :)

raattgift 4/1/2025|

Sundials are really really cool, and the shadow sweeps in the clockwise direction at mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere, but

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial#In_the_Southern_Hemisp...

So "clockwise" is because the Earth's axis of rotation about itself is not too far from perpendicular to its orbital plane of rotation around the sun, and because the Earth rotates counter-clockwise from the perspective of someone hovering above the planet's north pole. This is the right-hand rule.

Earth's axis of rotation (and orbital plane) is fairly well aligned with most of the round bodies in the solar system, except notably for oddball tilted Uranus and anti-aligned Venus (and the pretty different orbital planes of the minor planets like Pluto and Eris).

The sun's north pole (following the right-hand rule) and south pole do not point to anywhere particular in the galaxy, and its axis of rotation is highly tilted with respect to the axis through the central bulge of the Milky Way. A nice diagram that seems to have originated from the European Southern Observatory: <https://www.physicsforums.com/attachments/motion-of-earth-an...>

Most disc-like structures we've found tend to be randomly oriented compared to each respective host galaxy's polar axis.

For spiral galaxy rotations we have much better data from mostly edge-on views because we can measure the doppler shifts of molecular clouds at their margins; the advancing side will be less red-shifted than the trailing side. Spectral lines also broaden with the magnitude of rotation. AFAIK there is nothing at all unexpected about the distribution of trailing vs leading edges on our sky; the mystery is in the magnitude of the rotation of these outer gas clouds compared to things like their galaxy's apparent optical brightness or other markers of mass.

Also fun is that for elliptical galaxies, these gas clouds don't rotate around the equatorial bulge of those that have them. They instead tend to move mostly radially deeper and shallower within their host galaxy.

So if galaxies don't choose the rotation of their internal components like star systems or radio-loud objects like pulsars and relativistic-jet-equipped black holes, why (accepting for the sake of this argument that this garbage paper is correct about there being a bias in face-on spiral galaxies) would a distant galaxy affect us more than our own?

nottorp 4/1/2025||

Heh I was joking but you can trust HN to have someone come up with a comprehensive explanation for anything :)

tlogan 3/31/2025||

Could this be related that the weak force only interacts with left-handed particles (and right-handed antiparticles)?

wojo1206 3/31/2025|

US left-handed presidents are also over-represented. This is another reason to feel special in our neighborhood.

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