What are the odds that most galaxies in the universe rotate in the same direction? With all the chaos of cosmic evolution—the expansion of space, the formation of structure, and the countless interactions between galaxies—you’d expect things to be fairly evenly distributed. A random mix of clockwise and counterclockwise spinning galaxies should be the norm. But that’s not what researchers are seeing.
Now, what if I told you this strange observation might hint that we’re inside a black hole?
Recent data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed something unexpected. By examining 263 galaxies from the early universe, a team from Kansas State University found a surprising imbalance: 60% of these galaxies appear to rotate in one direction, while only 40% rotate the other way. That’s a stark contrast to what conventional cosmology predicts, which assumes that on large scales, the universe should have no preferred direction.
According to Lior Shamir, one of the researchers involved in the study, this isn’t some subtle statistical anomaly. “The analysis of the galaxies was done by quantitative analysis of their shapes, but the difference is so obvious that any person looking at the image can see it.” If true, this could mean our understanding of the universe’s structure is incomplete.
So, what could be behind this unexpected trend? One possibility is that the universe was born spinning. If that’s the case, it might support the idea of black hole cosmology—a concept that suggests our entire universe exists inside a black hole within a larger cosmos. This would be a radical shift in how we think about the nature of reality.
Another explanation is more grounded in observational effects. The Doppler shift—the same principle that makes an ambulance siren sound different as it moves toward or away from you—could be at play here. If galaxies spinning in a direction opposite to the Milky Way appear brighter due to their motion relative to us, they could simply be overrepresented in observations. If that’s the case, we may need to rethink our distance measurements, which could help explain other cosmological puzzles, like discrepancies in the universe’s expansion rate.
Whether this anomaly is an illusion caused by our perspective or a deep fundamental property of the cosmos remains to be seen. More observations will be needed to test these ideas, but one thing is clear: the JWST is showing us a universe that’s far stranger than we imagined.
For more details, check out the full study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and read about it here.