Today the esteemed scientific field of “Yeah, No Shit” Studies received its latest entry: A computational astronomer at Kansas State University has presented a new study suggesting that not just planets, stars, and galaxies spin in a rotation, but the entire universe itself was born with this structure. Not only that, but if the signs of cosmic rotation are more significant from further back in time, than the implication is that our universe is losing this structure and slowly devolving into chaos. The entire population of Earth responded to this latest theory by laughing, gesturing vaguely at everything and saying, “Wow, stop the fucking presses, Poindexter.”
Vice reports that astronomer Lior Shamir presented his findings at the 2020 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, currently being held virtually thanks to the pandemic. The TL;DR version goes something like this: Shamir created an algorithm that studied the spin directions of around 200,000 spiral galaxies observable by telescopes on Earth, and the results show an asymmetry between the number of galaxies with opposite spin directions. This “can be an indication of a rotating universe,” in that there should be 50-50 odds of galaxies spinning in either clockwise or counterclockwise direction, but his findings show a ratio of 51-49 in favor of clockwise galaxies. That may not sound like much, but with such a vast dataset, the chances of that asymmetry are fewer than one in a million, according to Shamir. Similarly, the odds of anyone being the least bit fucking surprised by the possibility that everything is descending into chaos are fewer than one in 7.594 billion.
Obviously, there are some huge “however” elements to consider, the largest being that the spinning universe theory currently violates the cosmological principal—the idea that the same physical laws apply everywhere in the universe, meaning all this shit is random and unstructured. Asymmetries on a cosmic scale of the sort studied by Shamir would violate that, and the scientist himself cautions against seeing this as proof of the spinning universe theory, saying it’s still a “rather exotic” interpretation, and that there are other potential explanations that wouldn’t violate standard cosmological assumptions. The entire population of the third planet from the sun, however, replied by mentioning that, thanks, Shamir, we’ll take it from here, and it’s all slowly becoming chaos, check. Several even added that “time is a flat circle,” though they were quickly admonished to update their cultural references.