This Week’s Science News from SWTG

The Universe's Spin & A Clue To Consciousness

The Universe Seems to Spin, New Data Reveal

Credit: NASA

I honestly didn’t see this coming: A new study has found that the universe might be spinning. What does that even mean? Let’s have a look.

Many galaxies, like our own Milky Way, have a spiral shape, with arms winding around a central bulge. These spirals form because the galaxies rotate and the arms trail behind. Astronomers like to study these spiral galaxies because their distinct structure can tell us something about the overall formation of structures in the universe, and about the influence of dark matter on those structures. At least that’s what they say. I think they just study spiral galaxies because they’re pretty.

Be that as it may, the first galaxies in our universe are particularly interesting because for them we know how old they are: They can’t have formed before the Big Bang. One of the missions of the James Webb Space Telescope was to look for those early galaxies that began to form a few hundred million years past the Big Bang.

One of the surprises that the data from the Webb telescope delivered is that galaxies grow and develop structures much faster than the dark matter hypothesis predicted. It was a prediction of modified Newtonian dynamics instead, as we just talked about a few weeks ago. But this new finding? No one predicted this.