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Posted by instagraham 3/31/2025

James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise(www.smithsonianmag.com)
356 points | 310 commentspage 5
soulofmischief 3/31/2025|
What if we're just upside down? :)
herdrick 4/1/2025||
Candidate for hardest collective fall for an April Fool's Day joke in Hacker News history?
93po 3/31/2025||
sorry if someone already asked this, but what is clockwise when there's no "up"? The earth axis is like 60 degrees off the axis of milky way, so it's not clear what the frame of reference is.
pixl97 3/31/2025|
In theory it doesn't matter what the frame of reference is.

Instead of thinking of it like spin, think of it like heads or tails. Both are binary measures and frame of reference doesn't matter. For example if you're flipping a penny on a glass table and someone is looking from the bottom, they'll see the same ratio as you.

In a fair universe you'd expect pretty much a 50/50 heads/tails clockwise/anti-clockwise outcome. But instead we something like 66/34 or 75/25. The actual direction of spin doesn't matter. The fact the measurement is unbalanced does.

93po 4/1/2025||
That makes sense, but the article title says "clockwise". Why did they choose that word instead of "counter-clockwise"? They must be some threshold of "this 180 degrees is up and this other 180 degrees is down" for them to have chosen one word over the other.
tagami 3/31/2025||
If you look at the galaxy from the other side, wouldn’t it be counterclockwise?
bigmadshoe 3/31/2025|
Yes, but I think the interesting thing is that there are a greater number of galaxies spinning one way than another.
GuinansEyebrows 3/31/2025||
Correction: Oops, The Telescope Was Just Spinning Counter-Clockwise, Our Bad
gerad 3/31/2025||
On the antipodal side of the universe they mostly rotate counterclockwise. ;-)
wokewombat 3/31/2025||
isn’t counterclockwise same as clockwise whe viewed from the other side?
Mekaniko 4/1/2025||
Does that mean we're in the northern or southern unisphere ?
wwarner 4/1/2025||
A sample size of 263 galaxies isn’t enough to draw any conclusion.
martini333 3/31/2025|
My clock also runs clockwise, when seen from one of two sides...
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