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200,000 Elliptical Galaxies Point the Same Way

KentuckyFC sends us to arXiv, as is his wont, for a paper (abstract; PDF preprint) making the claim that 200,000 elliptical galaxies are aligned in the same direction; the signal for this alignment stands out at 13 standard deviations. This axis is the same as the controversial alignment found in the cosmic microwave background by the WMAP spacecraft.

448 comments

  1. Why? by bcmm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Do they give any reason that this might be so? Are the galaxies in the same area? Did they all form from some insanely massive rotating structure or something?

    --
    # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
    Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
    1. Re:Why? by dashslotter · · Score: 5, Funny

      Does it really matter? 200,000 elliptical galaxies can't be wrong!

      --
      I was flipping bits on an abacus, newb.
    2. Re:Why? by notque · · Score: 4, Funny

      Because they are terrorists. From the article,

      "The axis of the CMB alignments has been referred to as the Axis of Evil"

      --
      http://use.perl.org
    3. Re:Why? by gedhrel · · Score: 1

      In the same area? Well, er, yes, kind of. "Redshift 0.20" is what the abstract says.

    4. Re:Why? by gedhrel · · Score: 1

      That is, redshift < 0.20. It's stretching a point to call it "local" though.

    5. Re:Why? by iluvcapra · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It might mean that the angular momentum of the universe is nonzero, if a majority of them are turning the same direction. Or, even if they all cancel out, that momentum in the early universe tended to be oriented in a plane. (IANAP, just a guess but seems logical)

      I'm curious if the Milky Way is a part of the alignment.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
    6. Re:Why? by fygment · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The author states that the reasons for the orientation are beyond the scope of the paper. But the implication of the orientations is that the universe is not spherical. I have had only one course in cosmogeny (origins of the universe) and all the models lead to symmetry. So any indication of a lack of symmetry implies that we are missing some big piece of the puzzle. Combine this with the tenousness of many of the theories of cosmology (eg. Big Bang ... far from perfect and getting further ) and the picture emerges that there is not a lot that is actually known about the structure of the universe. Despite all the bravado and pat statements in the media, all we have are half-baked guesses. Mind you, does it really matter? Given our very short lives in the grand scheme of things, the lack of knowledge probably isn't hurting us.

      --
      "Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
    7. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      From the paper:

      "A discussion of possible causes for these alignments is beyond the scope of this paper. "

      i.e. We don't know....

    8. Re:Why? by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 1

      I'd say Gravity. Our moon orbits around Earth, that orbits around the Sun, that orbits around the nucleus of the Milky way, that orbits around something we don't know is there yet, perhaps?

      --

      "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    9. Re:Why? by WormholeFiend · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Mind you, does it really matter? Given our very short lives in the grand scheme of things, the lack of knowledge probably isn't hurting us.

      We have short individual lives, but the knowledge that we discover outlives us.

      If one day our descendants find ways to travel beyond our solar system, this knowledge might prove useful to them.

    10. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny
      1. Moon orbits Earth
      2. Earth orbits Sun
      3. Sun orbits Milky way center
      4. ???
      5. Profit.
    11. Re:Why? by Lord+Ender · · Score: 1

      momentum in the early universe tended to be oriented in a plane A plane, or an M-brane?
      --
      A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
    12. Re:Why? by Shag · · Score: 2, Informative

      The researchers I work with are interested in targets at z=0.03-0.08, which they consider "nearby." (Their targets aren't galaxies.)

      That's 400 million to 1 billion light years.

      Right around the corner.

      z=0.20 is sufficiently distant that the restaurants don't even deliver.

      --
      Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
    13. Re:Why? by jimstapleton · · Score: 4, Funny

      if 200,000 eliptical galaxies jumped off of a cliff... would you?

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    14. Re:Why? by SQLGuru · · Score: 1

      I think I'll wait for the stable version of Redshift before I install it on any machine I care about.....0.20 is too early of an alpha to play around with.

      Layne

    15. Re:Why? by SQLGuru · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Or maybe the universe is spherical but with a much larger radius than we ever expected......two points, close together on the surface of a rather large sphrerical object would have almost parallel paths to that center.......

      Layne

    16. Re:Why? by Corwn+of+Amber · · Score: 1

      Symmetrical? When I read tha, I thought "yeah, like, there is some central point, and a copy of myself at twice my distance to the center, from here".

      That is exactly as brain-dead as the symmetrical time "theory". So, what is "symmetrical" ??

      --
      Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
    17. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      M-brane

      Zombie!

    18. Re:Why? by Reverend528 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Does it really matter?

      30 helens agree. it doesn't.

    19. Re:Why? by ATMD · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, I imagine I'd be pulled off the cliff whether I liked it or not by the massive gravitational field...

      --
      Nobody else has this sig.
    20. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The alignment is not especially surprising, but the explanation offered is probably not correct, or at least not that important. If you have rotating gravitating bodies, like galaxies, they will exert torques on each other. Given a lot of time to act - literally billions of years - you might well produce such an alignment over the vast distances involved. The magnetic explanation conjectured in the paper seems unwarranted, but is probably an effort to account for the electromagnetic background anisotropy at the same time. A very neat analysis of a lot of data though!
                IAAP, but don't want to be understood as criticizing the author.

    21. Re:Why? by ttapper04 · · Score: 1

      Heres the deal: In the early universe there was nothing more then a bunch of gas, and it was hot. Electrons sort of wandered around free of there nuclei, there were alot of ions floating around. A large scale magnetic field would have an effect on these charged particles, putting a force on them. The force leads to rotation along the field lines of the magnetism. We cant physically see the magnetic lines, but we observe their consequence in the large scale alignment of th galaxies. Keep in mind that most elegant theories dead wrong (circular orbits), and theres alot of bad science out there.

    22. Re:Why? by ATMD · · Score: 5, Interesting

      OK, I may be making a fool of myself here, but how can the entire Universe's angular momentum be non-zero? Surely momentum can only ever be relative to your frame of reference - and by definition, any frame of reference you can think of will be within the system you're trying to measure.

      Although... thinking as I type here... say you were sitting on a massive spinning top, and all you could see was the spinning top. You'd still feel centrifugal force, as a result of its spinning. Could be an interesting explanation for dark energy?

      (and yes, now I remember that important word "inertial" from A-level Physics lessons. Meh...)

      --
      Nobody else has this sig.
    23. Re:Why? by griffjon · · Score: 1

      If you look at them from the right angle, it's a large, flashing arrow-shaped sign that reads "Eat at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe"

      --
      Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
    24. Re:Why? by DittoBox · · Score: 1

      We should nuke them. It's the only Patriotic American thing to do.

      --
      Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
    25. Re:Why? by clem · · Score: 1

      z=0.20 is sufficiently distant that the restaurants don't even deliver.

      Which is a shame, as Andromedan cuisine is so much better in the Andromeda Galaxy. The local restaurants don't quite capture the essence.

      --
      Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
    26. Re:Why? by Serengeti · · Score: 1

      Only Battlestar Galactica, with it's thirteen colonies knows the answer...

    27. Re:Why? by Bemopolis · · Score: 1

      Yeah, not a good guess really, since elliptical galaxies have no (or very little) angular momentum. Their tri-axial shape was frozen in either during star formation or as a result of subsequent mergers, and is maintained by the fact that stellar encounters are elastic (hence no net angular momentum is exchanged).

      As for the total angular momentum of the Universe being exactly zero, that's unaffected by this result, although it seems well established from Mach's Principle. (and yes, IAAA, so this post is not ALL bullshit.)

      --
      "I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
    28. Re:Why? by B'Trey · · Score: 3, Informative

      Your first thought was correct. You'd feel centrifugal force (actually centripetal force - centrifugal force is actually a convenient fiction) only because of the mass outside the top which you're spinning in relation to. Unless there's a metauniverse outside the universe which influences this one in some fashion, and this universe is spinning relative to that one, then talking about the angular momentum of the universe seems as though it should be nonsensical.

      --

      "The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.

    29. Re:Why? by spun · · Score: 4, Funny

      Fortunately, in a billion years Andromeda will merge with the Milky Way so we'll be able to get genuine Andromedan cuisine right here in the newly formed Andromilkeday galaxy.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    30. Re:Why? by Kingrames · · Score: 4, Funny

      IANAP = I am not a planet?

      Pluto? is that you?

      --
      If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
    31. Re:Why? by SoCalEd · · Score: 1

      Very unlikely that the Milky Way numbers among the 200,000 as it is a barred-spiral galaxy, not an elliptical.

      --
      Insert witty comment *here*. I'm fresh out of wit...
    32. Re:Why? by yada21 · · Score: 5, Funny

      You translated it wrong. A more accurate rendation is "can we have some more funding please?"

      --
      I will have a sig when the market demands it.
    33. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The angular momentum would be equally distributed in the universe (in the form of spinning galaxies, for example), and NOT distributed proportionally to r^2, where r is the distance to the axis of rotation of some massive spinning top.

    34. Re:Why? by WhiplashII · · Score: 1

      Whoa...

      Let's think for a moment. Let's say that you are the super-mega brilliant race, billions of years more advanced than humans. You can reorganize matter with a thought - but your bored, and want to meet other races.

      The problem is that all the other races are billions of light years away. You know that faster than light travel is possible, but you don't want to have to search the entire galaxy for them. So what to do?

      Make a sign! Well, what kind of sign - we're talking billions of light years, the only thing visible will be entire galaxies. OK then, take all the "nearby" galaxies, and point them at us - that should draw attention!

      And of course, since they have such an advanced culture their galaxies are entirely composed of Dyson's spheres. You know, dark... they even absorb all the microwave radiation and gavity waves and convert them to power!

      It's so obvious!

      --
      while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
    35. Re:Why? by TMB · · Score: 1

      Coincidentally enough, the axis he finds is very close to the North Galactic Pole. Whether that means that the Milky Way would participate in this alignment then depends on whether the typical elliptical galaxy is more oblate (flattened in one direction, so kind of like a disk like the Milky Way), in which case the Milky Way would participate, or more prolate (elongated in one direction), in which case it is oriented exactly wrong to participate. The evidence from other sources is that ellipticals are more prolate than oblate, though more often they're somewhere in between. So I would conclude that it probably doesn't.

      [TMB]

    36. Re:Why? by el_cepi · · Score: 1

      That is just wrong, Axis have just three entities is an indisputable historic fact.

    37. Re:Why? by kenodi · · Score: 0, Troll

      exactly. "why" should have been the main issue but all the author wanted is just another paper out the door.

    38. Re:Why? by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 3, Informative

      > but how can the entire Universe's angular momentum be non-zero?

      Excellent question. So excellent that it led to an entire alternate model of gravity. A trip to the wiki is always useful: Brans-Dicke theory

      So, anyone want to put odds on dark matter going the way of the cublical atom in, say, ten years?

      Maury

    39. Re:Why? by jagdish · · Score: 1

      There is no such thing as Centrifugal Force

    40. Re:Why? by ch-chuck · · Score: 1

      A massive spinning top? I thought it was turtles all the way down.

      --
      try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
    41. Re:Why? by TinyManCan · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Perhaps they did not have any clue as to the 'why' but thought that the data was interesting enough to warrant further research.

      This is a great way to get working on the 'why', as without this paper no one would be looking at it.

      This is one way that science is done. They probably postulated that the alignment of galaxies would be random, and when they tested this hypothesis they found that the data did not match. Publishing that result so that others can start working on it is the next step in this process.

    42. Re:Why? by nschubach · · Score: 2, Funny

      By your reasoning: One "entity" could be the shared properties, another "entity" is the collection of galaxies, and the third "entity" is space. Or am I thinking too object oriented on this?

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
    43. Re:Why? by budgenator · · Score: 1

      My assumption is that having galaxies in alignment rather than randomly pointing implies that the universe's structure has an angular momentum which could mean that momentum was acquired before the big-bang. This is interesting because the universe's beginning is assumed to be nearly infinitely dense in both mass and energy so these should be homogeneous now.
      Any astro-physicists or cosmologists feel free to chime in because I'm not one.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    44. Re:Why? by kgskgs · · Score: 1

      Confession: I have not read the article so far.

      But still this is what I think. It is too early to conclude anything about angular momentum of the universe. The number 200,000 is negligible when you think of billions and trillions of them spread allover. Also the ratio of the mass of largest galaxy to smallest galaxy goes into millions. So if these are of small breed, then all of them combined would be smaller than some single big chunk out there.

      K

    45. Re:Why? by kenodi · · Score: 1

      They should have said that they don't know why. Simply. I agree with you that is good for the rest of the community to see the results and try to find an explanation but the author(s) should have been the first trying to find an explanation or admit they don't have any. But not that explaining why is "beyond the scope of this paper".

      What I am trying to say is that the paper would have worth a lot more if the author(s) could answer "why".

    46. Re:Why? by pscottdv · · Score: 1

      The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy

      --

      this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

    47. Re:Why? by ballpoint · · Score: 1

      That's something that's been bugging me too for some time. Think of a halterlike object, enclosed in a dark sphere floating around in a lone spot of the universe, lightyears away from any massive object. Install a strain gauge in the center of that halter. You will be able to detect whether the halter is rotating.

      But rotating, relative to what ? How does the universe affect the force measured ? By its mass, by gravity ? But how can a weak force like gravity, falling of by the square of distance and acting from a great distance, influence the relatively large centripetal force ?

      Adding it all up, there must be an absolute inertial frame of reference for rotation. Where does that come from, and why is it oriented the way it is ?

      Could anyone please point me to a readable text (slightly worn MS level) that explains this ?

      --
      Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
    48. Re:Why? by wanerious · · Score: 2, Insightful
      So, anyone want to put odds on dark matter going the way of the cublical atom in, say, ten years?

      What's the relationship between the angular momentum of the Universe and the rotational velocity anomalies of outlying material in galaxies or intra-cluster excess mass? How would that account for the dark matter gravitational lensing results from last year? I'm not seeing why one has such an effect on the other.

    49. Re:Why? by bcmm · · Score: 1

      Momentum and velocity are relative. Angular momentum and angular velocity aren't.

      For example, it is not possible to determine whether your spaceship is moving or not unless you have windows, but it's pretty easy to tell if you're spinning.

      --
      # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
      Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
    50. Re:Why? by Oktober+Sunset · · Score: 1

      No one ever said the turtles were the right way up. Put a turtle on it's back and it will spin really well.

    51. Re:Why? by smoot123 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The three most important words in science are not "I've got it!" but "Gee, that's odd."

    52. Re:Why? by Eponymous+Bastard · · Score: 1

      I just looked at the wikipedia page on Brans-Dicke theory and it shows nothing about angular momentum. Perhaps you care to explain?

    53. Re:Why? by DRAGONWEEZEL · · Score: 1

      If it was a microsoft product you'd have to move the decimal one place to the left, and it would still be too early of an alpha to play around with...

      --
      How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
    54. Re:Why? by budgenator · · Score: 1

      Dude that's like almost right next door if you even count the Magellanic clouds that is.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    55. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wrong. It's just not what keeps objects in circular motion... centripetal force does.

      But centrifugal force exists, in at least two ways.

      First, as the reactionary force against centripetal force. As you may recall, every action has an equal an opposite reaction. So, while the roulette ball is held in its circular motion by the centripetal force of the roulette wheel, it exerts equal force upon the wheel in a direction away from the wheel's center. This would be correctly called a centrifugal force.

      Second, "unnatural" centrifugal force can exist. Say for instance you tied a rocket to a string and swung it around on that string. If the exhaust from the rocket pointed at the axis of rotation and you ignited the rocket, that force exerted would be a centrifugal force.

    56. Re:Why? by Jack9 · · Score: 1

      We have short individual lives, but the knowledge that we discover outlives us.

      If one day our descendants find ways to travel beyond our solar system, this knowledge might prove useful to them.

      In other words, in the grand scheme of things, the lack of knowledge isn't hurting us and is NOT worth pursuing at this time.
      --

      Often wrong but never in doubt.
      I am Jack9.
      Everyone knows me.
    57. Re:Why? by Cervantes · · Score: 1

      No, I imagine I'd be pulled off the cliff whether I liked it or not by the massive gravitational field... That's fricken awesome! The first /. post in a very long time that has actually made me laugh out loud.
      Somebody mod this guy +6.
      --
      If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
    58. Re:Why? by budgenator · · Score: 1

      Given that the universe appears to be at least 12-13 Billion Years old, we'd have to outlive a couple Sun's to be more than short-timers in the neighborhood.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    59. Re:Why? by arth1 · · Score: 1

      For example, it is not possible to determine whether your spaceship is moving or not unless you have windows, but it's pretty easy to tell if you're spinning.

      Only if you can travel or communicate between two places in the spaceship. If you can only take measurements from one spot, you can't say whether it's spin, acceleration or proximity to a gravity well.
    60. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you taped two turtles back-to-back they might be unstoppable.

    61. Re:Why? by micromuncher · · Score: 1

      Sure we know. Its called "string theory."

      --
      /\/\icro/\/\uncher
    62. Re:Why? by ATMD · · Score: 1

      But rotating, relative to what?
      Rotating relative to an inertial reference frame. The halter isn't one of these, because any point on it is continually accelerating (ie. changing speed and/or direction of motion). I realise this now I've had time to think about it properly.

      BTW: What exactly do you mean by "halter"? I Wiki'd it and all I could find was something worn either by women or horses (depending on the sort of halter you're talking about).
      --
      Nobody else has this sig.
    63. Re:Why? by theskunkmonkey · · Score: 1

      He's just insane in the m-brane.

    64. Re:Why? by beckerist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why? Why admit that "they don't know why" when the data might be right there! You have to keep in mind, to discover these sort of patterns comes from completely indirect viewing. This was all done by observing redshift which means that only one in hundreds of characteristics were monitored. That's like saying "200,000 people are overweight" by knowing that they eat at a fast food joint 3 times a day. There will be some inaccuracies and one could only draw that conclusion by other, much closer observation. Moreso, the statement made was "200,000 galaxies are pointed in the same direction." -- not incorrect!

      My point is that they could very well have the reason "why" in their data, but chances are it would require a much further in-depth study of the individual galaxies themselves (or at least the common threads between them.) To get this pushed out the door now it at least gives others (and probably more qualified individuals) a chance to then take this data and run. Patience, we'll probably get the "why" (or at least some solid theories) soon enough, young Padawan!

    65. Re:Why? by Fallingcow · · Score: 1

      This is also why it's not a violation of the laws of physics for the Earth to spin, since otherwise it would be equally accurate to say that the universe is rotating around the Earth, which would require all of the stars to be traveling faster than the speed of light.

      (did I get that one right, Physics dudes? My last physics class was in high school...)

    66. Re:Why? by Goaway · · Score: 1

      They should have said that they don't know why. That is exactly what "is beyond the scope of this paper" means.
    67. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Space is clearly three dimensional (at least) so the obvious question is why is it not spherical? Our solar system is not spherical because gravity has had time to pull orbits together. Our planets rotate generally in the same plane as the orbit for some reason probably related to that.

      I tend to think that either the universe is far older then we could ever conceive, giving gravity time to even out galaxies even at great distance -or- more likely that there is some other force than operates at great distances and binds matter together; for instance a spinning bicycle wheel that you impact in one place 'absorbs' the force by changing the angular momentum throughout the whole wheel because the matter is bound together. There could be analogous forces at work in the universe that we are not yet aware of since they operate at such great scale.

    68. Re:Why? by MontyApollo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't know how it works with astrophysics and cosmology type stuff, but in other fields of physics, research is often divided between experimentalists and theorists. It might be the case where the author doesn't feel qualified to say why and thinks it would be better for theorists to jump in. Or he may think it is more important to establish is results and have them verified first before moving on.

      Also, if he did try to explain it, then it could really slow down how long it takes to get published because of the peer review process. His explanation would probably be highly questioned, and it would take longer to reach agreement with the peer reviewers. That might be why he said it was beyond the scope of the paper. He wanted to get the less controversial material out there first, then he could concentrate on the more controversial material in a different paper.

    69. Re:Why? by Marty_Krapturd · · Score: 2, Funny

      I just looked at the wikipedia page on Brans-Dicke theory and it shows nothing about angular momentum. Perhaps you care to explain?

      It has to do with fiber and penises...you wouldn't understand.

    70. Re:Why? by Jerry · · Score: 1

      Na. If it were Microsoft they'd move the decimal one to the RIGHT, instantly creating a version 2.0 release out of a 0.2 beta. Then they'd have their PR dept flood the world with claims of how much better it is than version 1.0, even though version 1.0 never existed. Windows fanbois would make comparisons between 1.0 and 2.0, showing how 2.0 is a vast improvement over 1.0, and would post uptimes of 10 years, proving how stable v 1.0 was and claiming v2.0 will be much better.

      And the Sheeple will buy it.

      --

      Running with Linux for over 20 years!

    71. Re:Why? by jythie · · Score: 0, Redundant

      Explaining 'beyond the scope of this paper' _IS_ saying they do not know why.

      And while yes the paper would have been more interesting if the authors could figure out why, but in reality it is far more valuable published without a why then holding onto the data till they have a plausible explanation.

    72. Re:Why? by mr_mischief · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That is one reason for something to be beyond the scope of paper. Another is that the paper has already hit the publisher's word limit. A third is that the topic at hand has been narrowly discussed for clarity or for time restraints on the project. A fourth is that the paper could become unwieldy if tangential topics are included.

      It could be a combination of any or all of those. "Further research is needed to determine why this is so" is not so vague, and could be used if that was the exact meaning intended.

    73. Re:Why? by bughunter · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Well, beyond the scope or not, they did discuss it briefly, pointing out other papers that may lend insight.

      But one possible cause they did not address is selection bias. Have they shown that they did not introduce any selection bias in the sampling of galaxies? I would hope for at least a list of hypothetical sources of bias that they then shoot down.

      --
      I can see the fnords!
    74. Re:Why? by Ash+Vince · · Score: 4, Informative

      Explaining 'beyond the scope of this paper' _IS_ saying they do not know why. Sort of yes.

      Anyone who has done Physics (or any other cutting edge science) to a high enough level will know that this is always true. The maxim I remember was that every answer asks a thousand questions. This is certainly true in terms of the astrophysics of spiral galaxies.

      Nobody even fully understands gravity even though the current understanding was presented by Newton and is known to break down as soon as you apply it to more than one body of approximately equal mass.

      They could have waited until the paper they published didn't leave some nagging great question answered, but they would have been waiting an eternity to publish an infinitely long paper that nobody would have ever been able to finish reading anyway. Since this is impractical, they published what they knew and left it to their successors (or themselves in a few years) to answer why. Even if they had have answered this why they would have found more why's just around the corner the someone could have posted to slashdot anyway.
      --
      I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.
    75. Re:Why? by mypalmike · · Score: 1

      > If you can only take measurements from one spot, you can't say whether it's spin, acceleration or proximity to a gravity well.

      Wouldn't a gyroscope/gyrocompass positioned anywhere in the spaceship suffice?

      --
      There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
    76. Re:Why? by naughton · · Score: 0, Redundant

      The funniest thing I've heard today. Heh.

    77. Re:Why? by kitecamguy · · Score: 1

      Gödel (yes, that guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del) wrote a paper, I think it was in 1948, that posited a rotating universe. I don't think he meant the paper to represent a plausible universe, rather it was a toy universe, but nevertheless was compatible with General Realtivity. I wrote a short paper that showed that the metric of the Gödel universe created helical world lines (in our universe the world lines (path of photons) are supposed to be simple curves, I believe either elliptical or hyperbolic, but I could be wrong). I was only an undergrad, I might've been totally wrong!

    78. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If I had mod points I'd give em to you buddy, well put. If more people actually understood the scientific method this world would benefit immensely.

    79. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "So, anyone want to put odds on dark matter going the way of the cublical atom in, say, ten years?"

      Let's bring back the Ether!

    80. Re:Why? by Eudial · · Score: 1

      Does it really matter? 200,000 elliptical galaxies can't be wrong!


      Clearly they are the lemmings of space. Just watch how they collectively jump down a spiral galaxy into a black hole.
      --
      GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
    81. Re:Why? by Alsee · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'll see your "Gee, that's odd" and raise you an "oops".

      -

      --
      - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
    82. Re:Why? by bazorg · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "WTF" plays an important role too.

    83. Re:Why? by arth1 · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't a gyroscope/gyrocompass positioned anywhere in the spaceship suffice?

      IANATP nor a PT, but I think you then would need two measurements, cause if the spin of the gyro happened to be on the plane of the spin of the system, I think the effects you normally measure would be zero sum.

      Then there's scenarios which make my head hurt, and which might (or might not - IANATP) negate your measurements, like if a planet equipped with big engines orbits a space plane, or if the windowless space ship floats within a bigger space ship which accelerates in a circle.
    84. Re:Why? by bromoseltzer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm curious if the Milky Way is a part of the alignment.
      Yes, it is, more or less: (from the FA)

      Elliptic Galaxy Axis 183±8 deg 41±8 deg
      North Galactic Pole 192.9 deg 27.1 deg
      1st no. is right ascension (longitude for stars), second is declination (latitude).

      This is really an amazing result. The galaxies way over there on the "left" side of the Universe know what the galaxies on the "right" are doing! It's so amazing, it makes you wonder if it might be wrong. For example, it might really be a property of some more local grouping of galaxies. Don't take it at face value -- yet.
      --
      Fiat Lux.
    85. Re:Why? by fourchannel · · Score: 1

      I accidentally modded you funny as my hand unexplicably spasmed on my way down to "Insightful". There is no undo except by reply =D

      --
      ---FourChannel---
    86. Re:Why? by geobeck · · Score: 1

      Do they give any reason that this might be so?

      My guess is that they're aligned to an intergalactic magnetic field. I seem to remember reading about a similar find over ten years ago, but with fewer galaxies examined.

      --
      Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
    87. Re:Why? by tsm_sf · · Score: 1, Funny

      Good to have you back, Feynman. We missed you.

      --
      Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
    88. Re:Why? by ChatHuant · · Score: 1

      BTW: What exactly do you mean by "halter"? I Wiki'd it and all I could find was something worn either by women or horses (depending on the sort of halter you're talking about).

      I assume he means barbell, since the French word for barbell is "haltère". So the OP's first language could be French or another Romance language

    89. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I accidentally modded you [...] ....You jinxed me.
      My first mod point = wasted

      There is no undo except by reply
    90. Re:Why? by Korin43 · · Score: 1

      What does string theory have to do with 200,000 elliptical galaxies all pointing the same way?

    91. Re:Why? by Starker_Kull · · Score: 1

      You'd feel centrifugal force (actually centripetal force - centrifugal force is actually a convenient fiction) only because of the mass outside the top which you're spinning in relation to.

      Actually, we don't know that, as we've been unable to remove all the other mass in the universe in order to test whether the differences observed in the physics between a rotating and non-rotating reference frame are due to the mass external to them. Before you jump in and say, 'of course it's due to the mass external to them!', remember that we have been unable to observe any differences in the laws of physics inside of reference frames moving in straight lines at constant velocity - called 'inertial' reference frames because the laws of inertia are correct within them. Surely these different reference frames are moving differently with respect to the mass outside them (the mass of the whole universe)? Newton considered that there might be special, 'priviliged' reference frames, namely those at rest WRT the center of gravity of the universe taken as a whole - the concept of absolute motion can be made rigorous in this way. As it turned out, once we were able to experiment sensitively with EM, the absolute reference frame hypothesis was contradicted by experiment - light admits no privilged 'rest' frame from which to observe it. So, perhaps you see that whether or not mass external to a reference frame affects the physics within the reference frame is not obvious at all, but an open question, which we may need new physics to ultimately resolve. (Unless you can think of a way of performing the experiment of removing the rest of the mass in the universe to test it directly!)

    92. Re:Why? by TemporalBeing · · Score: 1

      Excellent question. So excellent that it led to an entire alternate model of gravity. A trip to the wiki is always useful: Brans-Dicke theory

      So, anyone want to put odds on dark matter going the way of the cublical atom in, say, ten years?
      No. Too many scientists have too much invested in it to let it go.

      In other words, too many people have their Phds and/or Masters based on it to find anything else to have validity.
      --
      Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
    93. Re:Why? by Bobb+Sledd · · Score: 1

      I'm curious if the Milky Way is a part of the alignment. Yes...when I took my car into the shop to get a new set of tires, the wheel balancing tech was eating a Milky Way. Does that mean it was part of the alignment?

      I think Snickers is, too.

      (I'm sorry. Really, I am.)

      --
      "They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
    94. Re:Why? by TemporalBeing · · Score: 1

      If one day our descendants find ways to travel beyond our solar system, this knowledge might prove useful to them.
      So they can prove how wrong we were?
      --
      Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
    95. Re:Why? by clem · · Score: 1

      Mmmmm, fusion cuisine!

      --
      Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
    96. Re:Why? by tgibbs · · Score: 1

      OK, I may be making a fool of myself here, but how can the entire Universe's angular momentum be non-zero? Surely momentum can only ever be relative to your frame of reference - and by definition, any frame of reference you can think of will be within the system you're trying to measure.


      This idea was suggested by Mach. Einstein was reputedly very intrigued by this, and tried to work it into his theory of relativity, but in the end did not do so--in his theory accelerated movements such as rotation are not dependent on frame of reference.
    97. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That is one reason for something to be beyond the scope of paper. Another is that the paper has already hit the publisher's word limit. A third is that the topic at hand has been narrowly discussed for clarity or for time restraints on the project. A fourth is that the paper could become unwieldy if tangential topics are included. Fifth, more papers good :P
    98. Re:Why? by stonefry · · Score: 1

      How does he know that 100,000 of them aren't pointing in the opposite direction?

    99. Re:Why? by M1FCJ · · Score: 4, Funny

      it's a long string and all of the galaxies are tied to it, like beads...

    100. Re:Why? by bcmm · · Score: 1

      Does anyone apart from "Electric Universe theory" nuts believe in intergalactic EM fields which effect large-scale things?

      Correct me if I'm wrong...

      --
      # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
      Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
    101. Re:Why? by Neo_piper · · Score: 1

      Whart does String Theory have to do with ANYTHING...
      350 Pages of "Hyperspace" told me... Not much

    102. Re:Why? by Caerdwyn · · Score: 1

      No, because then I'd have their bikes.

      --
      Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
    103. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Misquoted and unattributed; good going there.

    104. Re:Why? by ballpoint · · Score: 1

      A barbell it is, indeed. Google image search turns up a lot of images that, while certainly more attractive, are not related to the shape of object I had in mind :) My apologies for blindly assuming that the english halter would have the same meaning as the dutch word halter, which sounds kind of english to me but probably has romance roots, as ChatHuant pointed out.

      Of course it is rotating relative to an inertial frame; that's the point. But where does this single non-rotating inertial frame come from ? How is it linked to the universe ? Isn't it strange that this frame is not rotating, not relative to other frames, but in an universal, absolute, valid-everywhere-you-can-possibly-imagine-and-beyo nd sense ?

      --
      Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
    105. Re:Why? by m50d · · Score: 1

      You are right in that it would be possible to find a rotating frame of reference in which the total angular momentum of the universe is zero, but a rotating frame of reference is not as valid as a non-rotating one; and you can tell, because in a rotating one you observe the centrifugal and corrolis pseudoforces. So if when we take this particular frame the universe as a whole is rotating (and we can tell that by measuring the centrifugal "force", without needing a reference point outside the universe), or equivalently in a non-rotating frame we observe that the angular momentum of all the objects in the universe adds up to something other than zero, then the universe has a non-zero angular momentum.

      --
      I am trolling
    106. Re:Why? by JudgeFurious · · Score: 1

      Don't forget the most important phrase in "Texas Science"

        "Hey baby, hold my beer and watch this!"

      --
      Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
    107. Re:Why? by geobeck · · Score: 1

      Does anyone apart from "Electric Universe theory" nuts believe in intergalactic EM fields which effect large-scale things?

      Plasma universe theory. And besides, who cares what people believe? The point is what you can see, and what theory fits the evidence. The Electric Universe nuts are indeed nuts, but they pulled a few ideas from other reasonable theories.

      Let me know if you find a theory that shows how 200,000 galaxies can form a common alignment in less time than the established lifetime of the universe.

      I'm not saying the plasma universe theory is correct. Actually, I'm saying no cosmological theory explains everything. A few of them are right about quite a few things, but every theory is wrong about a few things too.

      --
      Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
    108. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I thought it was global warming. Which helps to explain why the rest of the universe is somewhere around -454 degrees Fahrenheit.

    109. Re:Why? by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      Personally, the words "Gee, that's odd" are the LAST thing I'd want to hear from a nuclear physicist. There's a very good possibility they'd be followed by a loud *BOOM*.

    110. Re:Why? by Prune · · Score: 1

      I'm reminded of Fred Hoyle's "A For ANdromeda"

      --
      "Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
    111. Re:Why? by spun · · Score: 1

      Luckily for me, I had just swallowed my coffee before I got that joke...

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    112. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, obviously not again..

    113. Re:Why? by x2A · · Score: 1

      *lol* excellent

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    114. Re:Why? by Garridan · · Score: 1

      Man. How short-sighted are the Republicans, complaning about Mexican immigrants?

    115. Re:Why? by strikethree · · Score: 1

      "We have short individual lives, but the knowledge that we discover outlives us."

      Well, until the next Nero comes along anyways.

      strike

      --
      "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
    116. Re:Why? by Smurf · · Score: 1

      While all the reasons you give are valid for writing "...beyond the scope of this paper," I would venture to say that, by FAR the most usual reason is the one given by the GP.

      See the Academese->English translator.

    117. Re:Why? by Goaway · · Score: 1

      Under other circumstances, maybe. Anybody who is used to reading papers like this will instantly understand it as "we don't know why, and we leave that question open for further work".

    118. Re:Why? by An+Anonymous+Coward · · Score: 1

      "Oops" means I can fix the problem. "Oh shit" means I can't.

    119. Re:Why? by sg_oneill · · Score: 1

      Pretty much. This is an incredibly significant finding, as it means that theres something very fundamental about the geometry of the universe that we are missing.

      Thats not really for some telescope guys to work out, thats something that the 'big math guys' need to puzzle over, and see if they can come up with anything for the telescope guys to look out for, to find an answer.

      Or to put it more simply, the telescope guy would be asking the big-math guys "What should I be looking out for right now?"

      Which is not to say the telescope guy isnt also a big-math guy, but why and what are different sorts of questions, and best teased apart. Especially if another guy comes up with a better reason.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    120. Re:Why? by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 0

      > What's the relationship between the angular momentum of the Universe and the rotational
      > velocity anomalies of outlying material in galaxies or intra-cluster excess mass?

      Nothing directly, but it's a pattern to an end.

      Every time we turn on a new telescope we see something that shouldn't exist. First galaxies had too much rotational energy, so, after ignoring it as a non-issue for a couple of decades, we invented dark matter.

      Then we had this other problem that the universe's large-scale structure could not have possibly condensed into the super-clusters, so we invented another kind of dark matter, and needed ten times as much of it as the other stuff we couldn't find.

      And then we started seeing fully formed galaxies at distances that meant they formed in a period of time that simply could not have possibly happened through gravity alone. So some more hand waving started, and everyone decided it was some other dark matter effect.

      Ok, well you can pile up all the dark matter you want, but that's not going to make all the galaxies point in the same direction. And when we figure THAT out, I doubt there'll be any dark matter in there at all. MOND, STV, whatever, its time to stop with the warts and get on with the work.

      Maury

    121. Re:Why? by MasterThis · · Score: 1

      Maybe we're all in some giant NMR/MRI

    122. Re:Why? by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > Brans-Dicke theory and it shows nothing about angular momentum

      You're right. That sucks.

      Basically the idea behind BD, and the other ST and STV theories, is that there is an additional field, not just the tensor field of GR. One of the side-effects of the field in the BD theory is that angular momentum "falls out" of the universe. This is actually kinda important.

      In traditional models, the conservation laws you know don't really _have_ to exist. For instance, if the universe was shaped like an egg, billiard balls would always roll into one corner of the table because there's more mass on that side of the universe. The fact that it is conserved says a lot about the universe, specifically that is symmetric around any point in 3-space. Conservation of angular momentum is similar; it says the universe is symmetric around other axis as well -- linear momentum would still be conserved in a universe shaped like a cigar, along any axis the gravity is still even, but in this case a spinning object would speed up and slow down. Conservation of energy is due to the fact that the universe is symmetrical in time, physics in the past is the same as it is today.

      Ok, but like I said, those laws don't _have_ to be true, and this bugged the hell out of a lot of people over the years. I forget which one of them, I think Brans, was thinking about what would happen if you spun a dish full of water in an empty universe... would the water rise up the sides? And if it doesn't, why not? Isn't either answer a little weird?

      The extra field in DB theory answers the question -- the answer is "yes", the water will rise up on the sides. It wasn't designed to do that, at least I don't think so, but it ends up popping out of the math.

      So basically if you end up with odd angular momentum terms in the universe, it MAY suggest that some other model of gravity might be more correct. Right now everything we've ever measured can't tell between the various models, but this might.

      Maury

    123. Re:Why? by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 1

      > No. Too many scientists have too much invested in it to let it go.

      Bologna. Everyone says shit like this, but it's always crap.

      Scientists LOVE being wrong. Not personally, but in the collective. LOVE it. They love it precisely because it clears away all the stratification. Fresh start time, open field, go nuts!

      Maury

    124. Re:Why? by arminw · · Score: 1

      ......saying they do not know why......

      Is science not generally better at exploring "how", rather than why? We can measure how much more mass a proton has than an electron, but can anyone tell WHY it is 1836 times heavier? We know that if it were not for that particular ratio, neither we nor any other life would be here to ask "why" questions.

      There are lots of relationships in physics we can measure pretty consistently, but nobody really knows why these are the way they are. This apparent alignment of galaxies is another discovery that has yet to yield an answer to the many "why" questions we ask from the time we can talk.

      It seems that for every answer that scientists find, ten or more new questions arise. That's what makes science interesting and keeps scientists employed.

      --
      All theory is gray
    125. Re:Why? by x2A · · Score: 1

      The center of the balloon in the analogy is the beginning of time. Space is limited to the 2 dimensions on the surface of the balloon. So, talking about the angle between lines from two points on the surface to the middle, is the same as talking about the angle between lines between two galaxies, and the big bang... ie, it doesn't really make sense to.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    126. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's just a glitch in the matrix, duh! (Either that, or they just look that way from here, because they're all revolving around me)

      Signed,

      The Cowardly Lion

    127. Re:Why? by x2A · · Score: 1

      The shape of the universe, not the contents of it, is where you would find symmetry. Just as the surface of a sphere has symmetry (an infinite number of lines in face) when talking about its shape, even if the the pattern on the sphere has none.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    128. Re:Why? by x2A · · Score: 1

      So why would there be an alignment of magnetic field in one direction to cause this to begin with?

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    129. Re:Why? by arminw · · Score: 1

      ......So, anyone want to put odds on dark matter going the way of the cublical atom in, say, ten years?.......

      The need for theorized dark matter and dark energy is based on two assumptions (beliefs). 1). The red shift is caused by the doppler effect. 2) That light has always traveled at the speed we measure today.

      It seems incredible that 70% of all matter and energy should be hidden so well as to not give the slightest real measurable hint of its existence.

      There is observed evidence that calls these two assumptions into question. The red shift is a measured fact, but its may have nothing or very little to do with motion.

      --
      All theory is gray
    130. Re:Why? by x2A · · Score: 1

      "Correct me if I'm wrong..."

      Maybe if you made an incorrect statement you could be corrected, but you actually asked a question, so there's not really the same scope for... damnit I'm correcting you!

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    131. Re:Why? by zxnos · · Score: 1

      not sure, but this was in the summary: This axis is the same as the controversial alignment found in the cosmic microwave background by the WMAP spacecraft.

      --
      always mosh clockwise
    132. Re:Why? by Gabrill · · Score: 1

      Don't forget the millions of discoveries by scientists who watch simple folk right after they say, "Hey ya'll! Watch this!"

      --
      Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
    133. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You should really turn your karma bonus off for offtopic posts like this.

    134. Re:Why? by arminw · · Score: 1

      .....Let's think for a moment. Let's say that you are the super-mega brilliant race, billions of years more advanced than humans. You can reorganize matter with a thought .......

      What about a mega-intelligent being that transcends the balloon we call the universe and who can travel at the speed of thought and not be confined to locality. The limitations of the speed of light, time and space would not apply to Him. Are you talking about God by chance?

      If you have an aquarium in your family room, what do the fish swimming therein know about your kitchen?

      (....Make a sign! Well, what kind of sign ......)

      To me a better sign would be to go and visit these fish in said aquarium.

      Isaiah 7:14 So, the Lord Himself shall give you a sign. Behold, the virgin will conceive and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His name Immanuel.

      Immanuel means God with us. Maybe He did give us a sign?

      --
      All theory is gray
    135. Re:Why? by drew · · Score: 1

      is actually a convenient fiction

      A laughable claim... perpetuated by overzealous teachers of science!
      --
      If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
    136. Re:Why? by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

      If by "used to reading papers like this" you mean people who don't also (and primarily) read papers from computer industry and computer academic sources, maybe.

      In the computer field, it's not uncommon to read an 400-page book on a topic that leaves dozens of things for treatment elsewhere. There's no sense in trying to sell an untargeted 9600-page book when your author and editor have produced 400 pages of meaningful, focused content. Of course, this also falls under your "other circumstances", but it's no maybe.

    137. Re:Why? by mikiN · · Score: 1

      The Universe is dying! Netcraft confirms it!

      --
      The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
    138. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You sure about that? Seemed kinda overblown there, not really worth reading, and sure as shit off-topic.

      Don't let a little reason stop you from blowing up at Microsoft unnecessarily though, it's great entertainment from the vantage point of sanity.

    139. Re:Why? by kjzk · · Score: 0

      Yeah, screw science. Bush needs a trillion more dollars for the Iraq occupation.

    140. Re:Why? by pablochacin · · Score: 1

      > Or he may think it is more important to establish is results and have them verified first before moving on. I agree. In research, it is a common practice to publish preliminary results to validate them within the research community. It makes no sense to start developing a theory to explain their results if they end up being wrong!

    141. Re:Why? by bcmm · · Score: 2, Funny

      What exactly does an experimental astrophysicist do? Create galaxies to see how they behave?

      --
      # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
      Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
    142. Re:Why? by bcmm · · Score: 1

      Pwned.

      --
      # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
      Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
    143. Re:Why? by bcmm · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Is it much easier to see galaxies which are aligned such that the observed area of the sky they cover is greater?

      --
      # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
      Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
    144. Re:Why? by bcmm · · Score: 1

      I saw this set as a puzzle once: You are in a locked room with no windows. You are sitting on the floor under what feels like normal gravity. You must determine whether you are on a planet or in a pressurised cabin on the edge of a big flywheel in deep space. You have any number of normal household objects. It is assumed that your far enough from the centre that the difference in perceived g between your head and feet is negligible.

      The answer is to spin a coin on the floor. If the whole room is in fact rotating, the conservation of the coin's angular momentum will prevent it from spinning stably on the floor, as it will try to stay spinning on the same axis (and so once the room has gone round 90 degrees the coin will be spinning sideways and thus the edge will be hitting the floor and so on).

      --
      # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
      Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
    145. Re:Why? by bcmm · · Score: 1

      And no, you can't tell the difference between a gravity well and acceleration unless you can detect the gradient in g.

      --
      # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
      Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
    146. Re:Why? by Jon+Erikson · · Score: 2, Informative

      The spinning bucket thing is related to Mach's princicple, which played a part in Einstein's thinking about the universe... although GR doesn't actually say anything about it.

      --

      Jon Erikson, IT guru

    147. Re:Why? by Cappy+Red · · Score: 1

      if 200,000 eliptical galaxies jumped off of a cliff... would you? No... ... but if I did, I would do it in the same direction.
      --
      This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
    148. Re:Why? by Eponymous+Bastard · · Score: 1

      So, you're saying that since the extra field is not invariant under rotational transformations then Noether's theorem doesn't have to apply to angular momentum? Or are the formulas not invariant under rotation?

      Besides, even if you end up with a total non-zero angular momentum in the current universe, that wouldn't necessarily mean it's not conserved, but rather that the original big bang had a non-zero angular momentum too. After all, if total energy is non-zero, why assume angular momentum must be?

    149. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, somewhere at the end of the 200,000 galaxies is a black hole where the last few disappear into?

    150. Re:Why? by B'Trey · · Score: 1

      Actually, we don't know that, as we've been unable to remove all the other mass in the universe in order to test [it].

      Depending on precisely what you mean by "know," there's a great many things we don't know. And you're certainly correct that new theories or evidence could arise at any time and cause a reinterpretation of what we believe. That beings said, Relativity says that the apparent force is caused by the external mass, and that's just as correct to view the top as sitting still while the universe spins around it and tries to drag you along with it. Relativity has produced a number of predictions that have been tested, and they've all been quite accurate. So yes, it's possible that the prevailing consensus is incorrect but I'll stick with it until I see some evidence indicating otherwise.

      --

      "The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.

    151. Re:Why? by wanerious · · Score: 1

      Every time we turn on a new telescope we see something that shouldn't exist. First galaxies had too much rotational energy, so, after ignoring it as a non-issue for a couple of decades, we invented dark matter.

      Ok, though I know a group of astrophysicists that would argue with the implication that their careers have been spent "ignoring" the implications of rotation curves.

      Then we had this other problem that the universe's large-scale structure could not have possibly condensed into the super-clusters, so we invented another kind of dark matter, and needed ten times as much of it as the other stuff we couldn't find.
      I'm not following --- why is this stuff different? And the amount on large scales fits neatly with the 6-10x "normal" baryonic matter found in individual galaxies, as well as the amount derived from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.


      And then we started seeing fully formed galaxies at distances that meant they formed in a period of time that simply could not have possibly happened through gravity alone. So some more hand waving started, and everyone decided it was some other dark matter effect.
      That the extant dark matter helped the galaxies clump together is an expected outcome.


      Ok, well you can pile up all the dark matter you want, but that's not going to make all the galaxies point in the same direction. And when we figure THAT out, I doubt there'll be any dark matter in there at all. MOND, STV, whatever, its time to stop with the warts and get on with the work.

      So far, no one I'm aware of has implicated dark matter in this effect, if it's even real.
    152. Re:Why? by PetraData · · Score: 0

      It should only take about 4 months to take them out and install spiral galaxies.

    153. Re:Why? by Dzonatas · · Score: 1

      It's the the BiggerBang(tm) theory

    154. Re:Why? by metlin · · Score: 1

      You obviously haven't had the opportunity to meet Sam Carter yet.

    155. Re:Why? by Starker_Kull · · Score: 1

      Actually, we don't know that, as we've been unable to remove all the other mass in the universe in order to test [it].
      Depending on precisely what you mean by "know," there's a great many things we don't know. And you're certainly correct that new theories or evidence could arise at any time and cause a reinterpretation of what we believe. That beings said, Relativity says that the apparent force is caused by the external mass, and that's just as correct to view the top as sitting still while the universe spins around it and tries to drag you along with it. Relativity has produced a number of predictions that have been tested, and they've all been quite accurate. So yes, it's possible that the prevailing consensus is incorrect but I'll stick with it until I see some evidence indicating otherwise.

      I think you missed my point and may not understand Relativity as well as you think you do. You are confusing General Relativity with Mach's Principle, which Einstein interpeted as meaning that inertia (both linear and rotational) is an effect of mass 'elsewhere'. He thought highly of the principle, and it motivated much of development of GR. However, GR does NOT depend on it - the assumption that non-rotating reference frames only can be defined WRT mass 'elsewhere' - so I was not suggesting you dump GR. What I was trying to point out is that you can determine if a reference frame is rotating or inertial by means of experiment, without refering to external reference frames, and thus it is not a nonsensical concept that the universe as a whole possesses angular momentum, but a physically defined question that can be (in principle) resolved by experiment. Specifically, if we observe that most of the matter in the universe 'rotates' compared to what is measured to be a non-rotating reference frame, then there is a difference between what 'should be' a non-rotating reference frame and what is a non-rotating reference frame as measured by the distribution and motion of the rest of the mass in the observable universe. Why this would be would be quite mysterious.... as mysterious as the observation that the rate of expansion of the Universe appears to be increasing rather than decreasing, leading to all of the dark matter and energy hypotheses! But that's what makes it interesting - the observation is what it is, regardless of whether it fits our best theories. Perhaps the observation is wrong, or perhaps we have found something unexpected - but either way, this particular one (the alignment of the axes of rotation of these galaxies) doesn't contradict GR.

    156. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Some assclown modded that redundant? WTF? It's among the first ten posts, it certainly isn't a repeat of the post it's replying too, niether of the article. Spacktards.

    157. Re:Why? by micromuncher · · Score: 1

      If you think that our 3 (4 /w time) dimensional universe is built on a 1 dimensional one as prescribed for behaviors of subatomic particles (including gravitons), and if you think that our 3 dimensional universe is actually not symetrical but asymetrical with interesting folds and compactions along the way, then the affect of gravity on formation and orientation of galaxies would be to flatten and orient them in a uniform direction, wouldn't it?

      Take the old "stone in the pond" analogy, except lets add bubblebath to make it more interesting. The bubbles (galaxies) tend to cluster together at the surface. Some bubbles may be above or below, but for the most part, they're at the surface. Still water was more uniform orientation than where you dropped the stone. Where you are looking through the ripples, things will have differing orientation.

      --
      /\/\icro/\/\uncher
  2. Scale it up by Verteiron · · Score: 1

    Eh, I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. They're probably just all aligned to the north magnetic pole of the universe, or something.

    Or perhaps they're not galaxies at all, but exhaust trails. Of something... big. REALLY big.

    --
    End of lesson. You may press the button.
  3. Centre of the universe by Big+Nothing · · Score: 1

    They all point outwards from the centre of the universe.

    Me.

    --
    SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
    1. Re:Centre of the universe by FuzzyDaddy · · Score: 4, Informative

      They all point outwards from the centre of the universe.

      Me.

      Actually, this has already been observed.
      --
      It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
    2. Re:Centre of the universe by Erioll · · Score: 1

      So where are the Rainbow Worlds then? Or do they only point toward the center of the Galaxy?

    3. Re: Centre of the universe by Black+Parrot · · Score: 0, Redundant

      They all point outwards from the centre of the universe. Or maybe God farted and they're just blowing in the wind.
      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    4. Re:Centre of the universe by pretygrrl · · Score: 2, Informative

      did a quick search, looks like this is the author: http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/author/M.Longo
      PhD physics, teaches U of MI
      another quick search of the article, and doesn't look like he mentions "Fingers of God" or Doppler at all. Outside the scope of the paper?
      i really wish people would stop w. the dumb ass soviet russia overlords bs
      perhaps that way, i could actually weed thru and see what the physicists have to to say on this.

      --
      Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.
    5. Re:Centre of the universe by goombah99 · · Score: 1

      I think that effect would not create a preferred single axis but instead would mean the axes tended to (appear) to be perpendicular to the radial direction from earth. Those would not be parallel axes for the galaxies.

      --
      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    6. Re:Centre of the universe by FuzzyDaddy · · Score: 3, Interesting
      "Fingers of God" is unrelated to the current paper. Fingers of God is an apparent anisotropy, while this paper describes an actual anisotropy.

      The fingers of god effect is simple - the doppler shift of a galaxy is proportional to the distance, according to Hubble's observations. If you do a plot of galactic positions, using the observed position in the sky and the red shift as the third dimension, you see what appear to be long, skinny clusters, all pointed directly at you. This happens because in tight clusters, galaxies are attracted to each other gravitational and have a range of velocities which is relatively large. So there's an added velocity on top of that caused by the expansion of the universe, which changes the distance you'd compute by Hubble's law.

      --
      It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
    7. Re:Centre of the universe by Ironpoint · · Score: 1

      I doubt you are or are at the center of the universe.

      Maybe you are just very, very close to the center of the universe in space and time. Things might appear the same in all directions. Perhaps if you leave the galaxy things would look a lot different. No one has really made it much farther than orbit.

  4. They're pointing the way to God, but... by Lurker2288 · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...but why would God need a starship?

    1. Re:They're pointing the way to God, but... by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 1

      ...but why would God need a starship?

      Isn't it obvious? The stargate got broken, duh!

    2. Re:They're pointing the way to God, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are people really missing the Star Trek V reference?

      I mean... it was bad, but you still saw it, right?

    3. Re:They're pointing the way to God, but... by thryllkill · · Score: 1

      I think the reference was kind of a stretch, since, well, there were no aligning galaxies mentioned at all in the movie.

      --

      Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.

    4. Re:They're pointing the way to God, but... by CaptnMArk · · Score: 1

      Please, nobody complain again about Star Trek starship alignment.

    5. Re:They're pointing the way to God, but... by NoPantsJim · · Score: 1

      ...but why would God need a starship?
      Have you ever tried to pick up chicks while driving around on a cloud? It's harder than it sounds.
  5. Holy Crap by everphilski · · Score: 1, Funny

    WMAP spacecraft.

    They are running their spacecraft off of a Windows-MySQL-Apache-PHP stack? well I'll be ...

    1. Re:Holy Crap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That might explain the server's latency...

    2. Re:Holy Crap by Mattintosh · · Score: 1

      No, no, no... That would be WAMP. Like the rats.

  6. Eureeka! by notque · · Score: 0

    They can point the same way... if.. that's a small sub-sample of even more galaxies that are arranged in a circle, and they are all pointing the same way but that's only because you're looking at a tiny fragment (tiny, I know) of the circle and they all look exactly the same at that small dataset.

    Ok.. what the hell does this actually mean so my crazy theories can at least have some basic in logic.

    --
    http://use.perl.org
  7. Re:quick by Xybre · · Score: 1

    I, for one, welcome our new gala... meh. Not worth it. You have a go.

    --
    Eternity is a time bomb.
  8. Assumption busting... by massivefoot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Huh. I don't really have a great deal of specialist knowledge on cosmology, but this seems to put a lower bound on the distance over which we can assume the universe is isotropic (i.e. the same in all directions). The abstracts puts an upper bound on the redshift of the galaxies involved in the survey, which is presumably roughly equivalent to limiting the distance they are from us, but surely the fact that this net angular momentum axis is closely aligned with an axis identified in WMAP data indicates that this is a far larger scale phenomenon?

    1. Re:Assumption busting... by Gandalf_the_Beardy · · Score: 1

      Isotropy just means the same in all directions. If they do point the same way, it's still isotropic. Now if some region had them aligned and other regions didn't then that would be more of a problem I feel.

    2. Re:Assumption busting... by pla · · Score: 4, Interesting

      this seems to put a lower bound on the distance over which we can assume the universe is isotropic

      I have to wonder - Could this particular anisotropy account for the Voyager paradox? That would set a much lower bound...

      Even if not, though, I really find this sort of anomaly fascinating. Almost everything cosmology has found since the dawn of modern science has pointed to a bleak, cold, basically empty univers that goes on identically forever in every direction. Even learning that the universe has some underlying structure would somehow seem a lot more comforting.

    3. Re:Assumption busting... by massivefoot · · Score: 2, Informative

      I think we're confusing two slightly different terms here. If they all point the same way it is most definitely not "isotropic," as there is clearly something different about that direction. If, however, as you move through the galaxy you find that the direction the galaxies are locally pointing does not change, it's still "homogeneous."

    4. Re:Assumption busting... by Gandalf_the_Beardy · · Score: 1

      Yes, from the point of sense of direction it's looking decidedly non isotropic... maybe Michealson and Morely were right and the aether lives....:-)

    5. Re:Assumption busting... by HaeMaker · · Score: 0, Redundant

      Here's another revelation...

      There is a magnetic force so powerful it creates a magnetic field the size of the universe and galaxies align to it.

    6. Re:Assumption busting... by massivefoot · · Score: 1

      I have to agree, it is very fascinating. I'm afraid I'm not aware of what the Voyager paradox is, however when we have a lower bound we aren't trying to find a lower one (that wouldn't restrict any further the interval over which we could make such assumptions), we want a bigger lower bound!

    7. Re:Assumption busting... by localman · · Score: 1

      Even learning that the universe has some underlying structure would somehow seem a lot more comforting.

      Really? How come?

    8. Re:Assumption busting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Infinity is still ultimately inevitable. If the universe is found to be finite, then of course, the next mystery is what lies outside the universe? (What "contains" our universe?) If this outside universe is finite, then what contains it? And so on.

      You can see that no matter how advanced, no matter how knowledgable or powerful we become, we will never reach the end of it. The only answer is infinity -- in other words, something which we as mortal human beings, by definition, can never have the ability to understand.

      I feel neither comfort nor anxiety over this; I consider it something that, as a mortal human being, I simply must accept.

    9. Re:Assumption busting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm afraid I'm not aware of what the Voyager paradox is

      He's probably referring to the Pioneer anomaly.

    10. Re:Assumption busting... by massivefoot · · Score: 1

      Possibly not, a Google search for "Voyager anomaly" did bring up several papers, but I'm not sure how it's related to a non-isotropic universe. It appears to be related to the bow show experienced by Voyager 1.

    11. Re:Assumption busting... by SQLGuru · · Score: 1
    12. Re:Assumption busting... by joh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have to wonder - Could this particular anisotropy account for the Voyager paradox? That would set a much lower bound...


      There's not only the Voyager anomaly (which we have very poor data of and may have totally conservative causes).

      Much more interesting is the Flyby anomaly, an unexpected and unexplained energy (velocity) increase during Earth flybys of satellites (or probes). It has been observed with at least four satellites yet and seems to show that our understanding of gravity/mass is subtly wrong in a very fundamental way.
    13. Re:Assumption busting... by pla · · Score: 1

      Even learning that the universe has some underlying structure would somehow seem a lot more comforting.
      Really? How come?
      Well, because in the absence of some anomaly in the structure of the universe, or a drastic oversight in the theory of relativity - We'll never leave the neighborhood.

      I mean, we might make it all the way to "nearby" stars in a generation-ship, but any sort of interstellar communication, nevermind trade, will not ever happen if we actually live in a flat Euclidean universe with c as the immutable speed-limit.
    14. Re:Assumption busting... by localman · · Score: 1

      I hear that. And I admit it's a little sad that we'll probably never meet other lifeforms out there.

      But at the same time, I think it's an infinite regress. Meaning we humans have already explored beyond our neighborhoods, our countries, our continents, our cultures. We've found strange and wonderous creatures in environments we cannot live in. We've gone further than anything else we know of. But we want more. I think if we could travel to other stars, we'd still want "more" just as much. If we knew a thousand other races on other planets, we'd be just as curious as to what was just beyond our reach.

      I'm not immune to that feeling, and it's probably important for us to keep that desire to some degree. But being aware of it helps me to soften it, and to instead take more pleasure looking deeper into that which is right in front of me, and working towwards discoveries that are a little more likely to be within my reach.

      Cheers

    15. Re:Assumption busting... by John+Hasler · · Score: 1

      > I mean, we might make it all the way to "nearby" stars in a generation-ship...

      Not true. Put on about one gravity of acceleration and you can reach any point in the universe in a few years.

      --
      Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
    16. Re:Assumption busting... by pla · · Score: 1

      Not true. Put on about one gravity of acceleration and you can reach any point in the universe in a few years.

      Sure, no problem - That acceleration just takes an infinite amount of force to maintain as you approach the speed of light. As soon as we solve that problem, the rest falls into place. ;-)

      Although I dearly love SciFi, I meant to keep my comments within the realm of the possible. I sincerely hope that we someday find a way to "cheat" Einstein and (effectively) travel faster than the speed of light. But as we understand things today, not happenin'.

  9. which beam by deopmix · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All i want to know is which beam is making them all align. I'm betting that it's shardik's beam, he's bad ass.

    1. Re:which beam by stoolpigeon · · Score: 5, Funny

      nope - the turtle.
       
      "See the TURTLE of enormous girth,
      On his shell he holds the earth.
      If you want to run and play,
      Come along the BEAM today."

      --
      It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
    2. Re:which beam by ekimminau · · Score: 1

      I believe, according to the Dune Universe, we are all but puppets of the God Emperor.
      It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion

      --
      Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
    3. Re:which beam by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 1

      Hmm I remember this cuter, cuddlier one:

      "See the TURTLE of enormous girth,
      On his shell he holds the earth.
      His thought is slow but always kind,
      he holds us all within his mind."

    4. Re:which beam by andphi · · Score: 1

      Should we be expecting Beamquakes any time soon?

    5. Re:which beam by Lurker2288 · · Score: 1

      I'm partial to the Dean variant:

      "See the turtle,
      ain't he keen?
      All things serve
      the fsckin' Beam."

    6. Re:which beam by stoolpigeon · · Score: 1

      That is nice - but I'm partial to Jake - always have been. This one of Roland's is nice but a lot longer.

      "See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
      On his shell he holds the earth.
      His thought is slow but always kind;
      He holds us all within his mind.
      On his back all vows are made;
      He sees the truth but mayn't aid.
      He loves the land and loves the sea,
      And even loves a child like me."

      --
      It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
    7. Re:which beam by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ka is a wheel. How fitting!

    8. Re:which beam by Prune · · Score: 1

      Source?

      --
      "Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
    9. Re:which beam by stoolpigeon · · Score: 1

      Steven King's The Dark Tower series.

      --
      It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
  10. Easy. They point towards the monolith by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 4, Funny

    They do. There's a monkey there with a bone as well.

    --
    Evil people are out to get you.
    1. Re:Easy. They point towards the monolith by Xonstantine · · Score: 2, Funny

      It's either the doing of the Xeelee or the Photino birds. Now we just have to find a way to get to the Great Attractor before the sun burns out.

  11. and here is why they are all alligned by FudRucker · · Score: 5, Funny
    --
    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
  12. galaxyzoo.org by Kartoffel · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's been posted before, but if this sort of thing interests you, get over to Galaxy Zoo and help them classify galaxies.

    1. Re:galaxyzoo.org by Cee · · Score: 1
  13. Maybe Dylan was wrong by mcmonkey · · Score: 4, Funny

    It seems you do need 200,000 elliptical galaxies to know which way the wind blows.

  14. New Axis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Just don't tell Bush that we've found a new Axis - next thing you know he'll be drawing up plans for a 13,000-galaxy invasion force.

    1. Re:New Axis by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      As long as he goes, too, it's worth it!

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:New Axis by chill · · Score: 1

      Hey, if it got him to allocate the resources and funding towards an extra-solar space program, that has been spent over the last 8 years on the various wars, I'm all for it. Invade away.

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    3. Re:New Axis by eutychus_awakes · · Score: 1

      I would love for this to happen. Not because I am for the invasion aspect of it, but just imagine if we spent as much money on spaceflight development every year as we have in Iraq and Afghanistan. We'd have that fleet (or invasion force, if you prefer) in relatively no time. BUT, it could then be followed up by countless scientific ventures based on the technology that might actually make the whole thing worthwhile. All this stuff we've mostly just been talking about for the past 40 years (large ion engines, NERVA type nuclear thermal drives, possibly even quasi-contained fusion, etc.) could all be within our reach. Plus, it would keep me employed for a LONG time. . .

      --
      This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
  15. this explains star trek! by kisrael · · Score: 3, Funny

    So this might help explain in Star Trek how all ships are always keeping the same orientation / sense of "up"...

    --
    SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
    1. Re:this explains star trek! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You know that is funny, but its actually kind of insightful!

    2. Re:this explains star trek! by Tango42 · · Score: 1

      I would guess they orientate their ships to the galactic plane. If memory serves the bearing system they use has the galactic plane as the zero for one of the angles, so it would make sense.

    3. Re:this explains star trek! by kisrael · · Score: 1

      Well, they still have to pick clockwise up or ccw up, eh?

      --
      SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
    4. Re:this explains star trek! by Tango42 · · Score: 1

      Yes, but that brings it up to a 50% chance of them being the same way up. Higher if you consider that they may have come up with interstellar standards. Every nation on Earth uses the same longitude and latitude system, why can't different races use the same system?

    5. Re:this explains star trek! by kisrael · · Score: 1

      Probably for the same reason we don't all use the metric system, or have Time Zones that shift by a quarter or half hour...

      --
      SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
    6. Re:this explains star trek! by Tango42 · · Score: 1

      I didn't say they must use the same system, I said why couldn't they.

    7. Re:this explains star trek! by kisrael · · Score: 1

      You're taking this rather seriously. And not just in the "look, it's just a show sense", but in ignoring the "heheh well if humans on one damn planet can't agree on simple universal measures, you think species of total disconnected evolutionary and cultural history will?"

      --
      SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
    8. Re:this explains star trek! by Tango42 · · Score: 1

      If I can't take Star Trek seriously on slashdot, where can I? ;)

      And the various Star Trek races aren't totally disconnected in terms of evolution (see "The Chase", TNG) or culture (we're talking about a system only used in interstellar travel, so there isn't much (or in some cases any) gap between when they might first create such a system and when they would meet their neighbours).

    9. Re:this explains star trek! by kisrael · · Score: 1

      Alright.

      Star Trek apologia is an ancient form. I remember reading book compilations of... what was that fanzine in the 80s, "Trek"? And that one column of explaining how someone could possibly be waiting for a turbolift given this and such scheduling and people inside the lift having stopped it... the twin assumptions that A. Star Trek is 100% consistent universe and B. Its portrayal onscreen is 100% faithful to that reality.

      --
      SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
  16. Cool! by KiwiCanuck · · Score: 1

    Now which way do I point my TV antenna to pick up GalacticTV?

    1. Re:Cool! by geekoid · · Score: 1

      Towards the 7th dimension

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  17. Re:quick by Kartoffel · · Score: 1

    Imagine a beowulf cluster of 200,000 elliptical galaxies. Latency between nodes could be a bit problematic...

  18. Um, no they don't by Normal_Deviate · · Score: 2, Informative

    The sample is 200,000 eliptical galaxies, and they showed a statistical tendency to point in a preferred direction. They most certainly do *not* all point the same way.

  19. obviously... by Connie_Lingus · · Score: 4, Funny

    all your axis are belong to us.

    --
    never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
  20. Translation? by Gazzonyx · · Score: 1

    I browsed the PDF and it's a bit more technical than I can currently handle; can someone give me the 'play by play' brief on the significance of the orientation of the galaxies and why the chance is so slim that they align as they do? Is this a case of, "this shouldn't be happening as we understand it, and the chances of it arising from random distribution are nearly 0"? Or am I missing something?

    --

    If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.

    1. Re:Translation? by Vellmont · · Score: 4, Interesting


      can someone give me the 'play by play' brief on the significance of the orientation of the galaxies and why the chance is so slim that they align as they do?


      I'm not a Cosmologist, but one would expect galaxy orientation to be pretty much random. As an example, think about if you threw a bunch of nails in the air. At any given time you'd expect the nails orientation to be pretty random (ignoring air effects, and any bias given by your throw). If they all aligned in a certain way though, you'd be surprised and start looking for a cause. (In this case say a strong magnetic field in the room).

      If this is true, there must be something orienting the alignment of galaxies. That could be either some bias in the big-bang, some outside force we don't understand, or something else.

      --
      AccountKiller
    2. Re:Translation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OK. Big Bang. Everything SHOULD be thrown out from the point of origin
      (Note: "P.O.O." Does NOT Equal "CENTER of UNIVERSE")
      somewhat randomly and somewhat uniformly.

      Alrighty. "Background radiation" from the Big Bang is still around the Universe as "Microwave radiation". This background radiation was predicted theoretically and almost simultaneously discovered by trying to eliminate the background source in a microwave telescope.

      Mapping of the background radiation found that it was not uniform, but has waves and eddies, and apparently (from the abstract) spirals.

      Cool thing. These eddies and spirals not only manifest themselves as patterns in background radiation, but in Galactic alignment. What this means is another source for speculation, but it definitely is an important force/factor/feature of the formation of the Universe.

    3. Re:Translation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If the assumption is that throwing a six-sided dice gives 1/6 chance of showing either of the sides, and out of 200,000 observed throws 100,000 of them shows a 5, you have to draw one of two conclusions:

      - you have just seen an event that can theoretically occur but is extremely unlikely
      - the assumption (even chance for all sides) is wrong

      Similarly, most/every model of the universe assumes a random alignment of galaxies, and we can bet that the one-in-a-close-to-infinite chance has not occured, we can conclude that most/every model of the universe has flawed assumptions in it and that they should rather have some assumptions that can account for the observation. Like, some alignments being more likely than other. The problem is that you can't just rip a piece out of a theory and replace it with another piece, the whole theory should fit together mathematically and may need rebuilding. Throwing out theories of the structure of the universe and bringing others in is usually considered Interesting Times Indeed (tm) by astronomers and physicists.

      The criticism from the post below is that "how can he say that galaxies really point in a certain direction?" which is along the lines of "could he be miscounting 4s and 6s as 5s as well, which would let the assumption of randomness survive?", which isn't totally illogical but having not read the article I guess he had some way of doing it.

    4. Re:Translation? by Bemopolis · · Score: 1

      Or maybe some force we do understand. Like, say, gravity. Think tidal effects.

      I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with the findings, only that we don't have to abandon known physics for some OMG PUPPIES!!! force.

      --
      "I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
    5. Re:Translation? by Vellmont · · Score: 1

      Sure. I guess when I say force, I don't mean one of the fundamental 4 known forces (strong, weak, electro-magnetic, gravity), I just mean an agent that can effect the universe. I say something we don't fully understand because presumably this is unexpected. So there must be something happening we don't understand, perhaps a complex interaction between different knowns.

      --
      AccountKiller
    6. Re:Translation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You know, tidal effects are due to so-called "tidal forces". Obviously, tidal forces are ultimately caused by gravity -- a fundamental force. Saying that a new force might exist doesn't necessarily mean that a new fundamental force exists.

  21. A grain of salt by Stranger4U · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I read the article, and there seem to be a few problems he doesn't really address. First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular. I don't think anyone has determined this to be the case, and he doesn't really have a way to get this from his data. Secondly, he doesn't give much real discussion to the error in the measurements, which is significant. No preffered axis of alignment would fall well within his measurement uncertainties. Finally, the 13-standard deviations is not from any real sort of error propagation, but from some random computer generated results. Could be interesting, but to be taken with a grain of salt.

    1. Re:A grain of salt by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 1, Informative

      > First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular. So let's consider the alternative: elliptical galaxies are actually elliptical but they have their ellipses aligned in just such a way that from Earth they could be construed as being circles with a strong preference to align towards a particular axis. Does that not sound a little ridiculous to you? There are times when having a flawed methodology makes your results sronger - not weaker. This is one of those cases.

      --
      Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
    2. Re:A grain of salt by bperkins · · Score: 4, Informative

      > First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular.

      All ellipses have a point of view where they project as a circle. Are you saying that his elliptical galaxies aren't elliptical? Even if they weren't, how would that create a selection bias?

      > He doesn't give much real discussion to the error in the measurements, which is significant.

      How would "error in the measurements" cause a selection to a particular orientation?

      Random error wouldn't move the average, just make the distribution wider. In fact random error ought to make the distribution more isotropic.

    3. Re:A grain of salt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Careful now, demonstrating a firm grasp of projective geometry and sampling/statistics is a good way to get a serious ass beating in certain parts of the US...

    4. Re:A grain of salt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are both idiots. Physically, elliptical galaxies are circular disks in space. They *appear* elliptical when viewed from Earth.

    5. Re:A grain of salt by mdsolar · · Score: 1

      Larger elliptical galaxies can be tri-axial and this is indicated by boxy isophotes, but these are rarer that smaller eliptical galaxies which can be described as axially symmetric. His sample will be dominated by these smaller ellipitcals. Regardless, aligning the major axis of triaxial objects would yield a similar observational result so long as a/b > b/c where a, b and are axis lengths in decreasing order. I would also say that randomization is a pretty normal method to examine to significance of a result (no pun intended).

    6. Re:A grain of salt by pla · · Score: 1

      First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular.

      This would necessarily hold true purely by geometry (at least using the standard meaning of "elliptical galaxy"), even if his more rigorous condition (Earth happens to occupy that magic spot) has no cosmological basis.

      Although we can hypothesize the existance of some bizarre shape that always looks longer than its width from any angle, that seems a bit of a stretch (no topology-geek pun intended) when just about every sufficiently-large object in the universe we know of looks like some form of standard 3d elliptical blob.



      Finally, the 13-standard deviations is not from any real sort of error propagation, but from some random computer generated results.

      Having myself done modelling and analysis of real-world (cognitive psychology testing) data, I can assure you that in most cases, you can get a FAR better significance level by randomized simulations than trying to use preexisting data (or worse, just assume everything as Gaussian, which I've seen far more often than I'd like to admit). In the lab, you consider yourself lucky to have an n>10; in the local universe, we only have so many galaxies visible as more than a nondescript pinpoint of light. In both cases, you can quickly generate billions of samples that lack a preferential value for the traits of interest, giving you a much better population to compare against.

    7. Re:A grain of salt by Tired+and+Emotional · · Score: 1
      > All ellipses have a point of view where they project as a circle

      True, but the assumption is that that direction corresponds to the axis of rotation. I tend to think that failure of that to be true would tend to add noise rather than a spurious result. Unless of course there was some other systemic effect, but that would be even stranger.

      Interestingly his method does not distinguish up from down so it does not mean there is an excess of rotation in one direction. Also it would be real interesting to generate the same data over a wider expanse and see if its consistent, and therefore a property of the universe as a whole, or whether it is a local property on a fairly large scale (and to determine what that scale is, in that case). Presumably it is significantly larger than 0.2Z since otherwise one might reasonably expect to see at least one boundary locally.

      Note I just glanced over the paper and did not give it a critical reading for flaws. Obviously, such a startling result needs close scrutiny and alternate verification. So not arguing with the grain of salt.

      --
      Squirrel!
    8. Re:A grain of salt by Stranger4U · · Score: 1

      They can be circular disks, but they can also be elliptical disks, oblate spheroids, prolate spheroids. The article does a fair bit of hand-waving without addressing the fundamental geometry of the disk, just its apparent geometry. In fact, an oblate spheroid could appear the same as a perfect sphere to us; how then do you determine the rotational axis. Looking at the variation of the spectrum of light emitted from the galaxy seems like a better way to determine the axis or, at least, the base geometric shape.

    9. Re:A grain of salt by Bazman · · Score: 5, Informative

      His "random computer generated results" test is what we statisticians call a 'Monte-Carlo' test. Its perfectly valid, given the assumptions he is working under.

      Suppose you throw 10 possibly biased dice and score 50 in total (where the average score would be 30).

      You then get 10 definitely fair dice and throw them 100 times, counting the total each time. If these trials only score 50 or more once, then the chances of your possibly biased dice being fair are 1 in 99. That's pretty much what he's done.

      With dice its possible to compute the probability exactly without doing the trials, since the behaviour of uniform probabilities (ie even chance of scoring 1 to 6) are well known and easy to compute. But if you have a situation of elliptical galaxies and their apparent projection on a sphere viewed from the earth then I suspect the computations may be harder...

    10. Re:A grain of salt by Stranger4U · · Score: 1

      I'm familiar with Monte Carlo modeling. My beef with the 13-standard deviations was how he got the value. He ran a bunch of simulations and evaluated the probability that there was an alignment in the direction he observed, instead of calculating the probability of a significant alignment at all.

    11. Re:A grain of salt by Stranger4U · · Score: 1

      Any spheroid with three different axes will lack an angle from which they appear spherical.

    12. Re:A grain of salt by Bazman · · Score: 1

      No its not - his test statistic, , is the mean of the 48 points of his ellipticity histogram (see fig 4). If there's a significant effect then the ellipticity histogram will show a peak _somewhere_, and hence push the mean up.

      I can probably think of better test statistics, since there's so much correlation in the 48 points...

    13. Re:A grain of salt by Stranger4U · · Score: 1

      I can think of a lot of things he could have done better. I'm not saying he's wrong, but I'm not saying he's necessarily right; that's why I titled my post "Grain of Salt." He's gonna have to do more work to convince people of this.

    14. Re:A grain of salt by TMB · · Score: 1

      I tried it out using better definitions of elliptical galaxies and using a more sane ellipticity estimator (I don't know what the hell he was thinking... let's take galaxies that are dominated by component A, fit them to a combined A+B model, and then use the ellipticity of component B!) and I find it at a 2sigma level, not 13sigma. So I would definitely put it in the interesting-but-needs-a-lot-more-work-before-I-bel ieve-it pile.

      [TMB]

    15. Re:A grain of salt by poopdeville · · Score: 1

      First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular. I don't think anyone has determined this to be the case, and he doesn't really have a way to get this from his data.

      Assuming the galaxies are elliptical, this is a trivial result of projective geometry.

      --
      After all, I am strangely colored.
    16. Re:A grain of salt by Bazman · · Score: 1

      If you're interested, I think I've managed to get the relevant galaxy data out of SDSS. For one of his cutoffs he's not explicit as to whether its a lower or upper bound, so I've just got all the data and I'll figure out which way it swings later. I'm guessing the cutoff is obvious if you're an astronomer. I'm just a failed astrophysicist :)

    17. Re:A grain of salt by mapkinase · · Score: 1

      Well, I will pass on eating this. I am well fed up.

      --
      I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
    18. Re:A grain of salt by Flagran · · Score: 1

      Suppose you throw 10 possibly biased dice and score 50 in total (where the average score would be 30).

      The average score of throwing 10 six-sided dice is 35; if you're averaging 30, then perhaps you are using five-sided dice?

      --
      Make love, not sigs
    19. Re:A grain of salt by Bob9113 · · Score: 1

      First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular. I don't think anyone has determined this to be the case, and he doesn't really have a way to get this from his data.

      I'm curious - and not an astrophysicist. Would it be possible to determine this by checking the difference in red-shift between the stars on one side and those on the other? Or is the red shift over such a "small" distance drowned out by the difference in the types of stars?

    20. Re:A grain of salt by Bazman · · Score: 1

      whoops yeah, well spotted :)

    21. Re:A grain of salt by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular. I don't think anyone has determined this to be the case

      With that kind of heresy, you'll get stabbed with the pointed end of a sphere.

    22. Re:A grain of salt by davecl · · Score: 2, Informative

      > First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular.

      All ellipses have a point of view where they project as a circle. Are you saying that his elliptical galaxies aren't elliptical? Even if they weren't, how would that create a selection bias?


      Actually there's a fair bit of evidence that elliptical galaxies are in fact 'tri-axial' - they have different sizes in all three dimensions, like a rugby ball or an american football that's been squashed slightly. They would thus appear elliptical from any viewing angle.

      (And yes, IAAA).

    23. Re:A grain of salt by Breakfast+Pants · · Score: 1

      Since a sphere is a spheroid, you are wrong.

      --

      --

      WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
    24. Re:A grain of salt by FuzzyDaddy · · Score: 1

      Start reading the GP post again, following the word "with three different axes".

      --
      It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
    25. Re:A grain of salt by mdsolar · · Score: 1

      Ellipticals have the shapes they do because their systems are dynamically hot. Stars are following orbits in all directions. But, some are oblate sheroids with some average rotational motion which can be measured via frequency shifts of stellar absorption lines. One that is "face one" (round in apperance) would not show this indication of rotation. But, there is no need that the eliptical have average rotation so you get less of a handle on what he is trying to measure I think.

    26. Re:A grain of salt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Time to return your astronomer badge. Only ellipsoids with dimensions a == b >= c are gravitationally stable.

  22. I don't see how this matters... by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 1
    IIRC, there's somewhere between 100 billion and 500 billion galaxies. So, let's split the difference and say there is 200 billion galaxies. Now these guys say that 200,000 have the same or very close to same axis direction. That's 1 out of a million. Divide the sky up into 1 million directions. Now, 200,000 of them all point in one of those directions, and the other 199,999,800,000 are in the other 999,999 directions. OK. divide 199,999,800,000 by 999,999 and we get 200,000 galaxies aligned in every other of the million directions. Now, if there are MORE than 200 billion galaxies, (and there may well be) the numbers grow for that. and I would like to see just how accurately they can plot the axis of some far flung galaxy - can they get it down to 1/1millionth of the sky?

    Now if these 200,000 galaxies are all in a particular region of the universe, THAT would be explosive news, but, unless I completely misread the article, this isn't the case.

    As it is, I think the news is interesting, but I find it less than compelling.

    RS

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
    1. Re:I don't see how this matters... by at_18 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Now if these 200,000 galaxies are all in a particular region of the universe, THAT would be explosive news, but, unless I completely misread the article, this isn't the case.

      It is the case. They were specially selected to be close to us (redshift < 0.20). I suspect these 200,000 galaxies are a fairly significant fraction of all the galaxies near us.
      Of course, they are close to us because more distant galaxies would be too difficult to investigate, but this doesn't change the fact that they are all in the same particular region of the universe.

    2. Re:I don't see how this matters... by BlueStraggler · · Score: 3, Informative

      My reading of the abstract is that he looked at a sample size of 200,000, and found a 13-SD bias to one direction in that sample size.

    3. Re:I don't see how this matters... by mcmonkey · · Score: 1

      Now if these 200,000 galaxies are all in a particular region of the universe, THAT would be explosive news, but, unless I completely misread the article, this isn't the case.

      You misread the article. If memory serves, by putting an upper limit on red shift the discussion is limited to galaxies in a particular region--namely closer to us. Galaxies further away would demonstrate higher red shift.

    4. Re:I don't see how this matters... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course you've forgotten to think about the statistics of every member of the sample to have the same orientation. There is always the chance of an inconsistency in the sample set, since it is supposedly a random sampling, and relatively small compared to the total, but even so, statistically it should be approximately representative of the whole. As such, it shows an oddity of the entire sample set having the same orientation, implying that all the others do as well.

      err, short version. The entire sample set is that way, so most likely, the entirety of the set is most likely the same.

    5. Re:I don't see how this matters... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A minor nit, but if there are between 100 and 500 billion galaxies, wouldn't "splitting the difference" give you 300 billion galaxies, not 200?

    6. Re:I don't see how this matters... by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 1
      yeah - but the math on 200 billion was easier - I could do most of that in my head....
      :-)

      cheers.

      RS

      --
      Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
  23. Surf's UP!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As soon as the earth comes in to alignment with them, the extra gravatational forces will pull at our oceans, causing excellent surfing conditions.

    Me^2
    Slashdot Robotic Overlord -- +1 (510) 495-6380

  24. einstein was right by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Funny

    god doesn't play dice

    he plays with magnets

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    1. Re:einstein was right by GaryPatterson · · Score: 1

      Einstein was misquoted. He originally said "God does not play dice with the Universe. He plays poker, but I think He's got a tell. When He bluffs, you get earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanos and hurricanes around the Earth. Still, He's a mean player but I always thrash Him at contract bridge. He's not so good at making deals with his partner."

  25. Why Not? by NReitzel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Einstein did not say that there cannot be a center of the universe.

    What he did say is that for the purposes of measurement, there exists no privleged metric. All this says (All?!) is that there is no overall coordinate system that will be superior to all other coordinate systems.

    If things started out as a big bang, on some scale, we will find a "center" of the universe. Is this an astronomy-shaking discovery? No. Maybe a tremor or two, for diehard relativeists. We already know that for specific purposes, there is often a preferred metric for computational or navigational purposes. Remember back in the Apollo program when the physics guys tried to explain that at a specific point, the coordinate system for the spacecraft shifted over from Terra-centric to Luna-centric, and the reporters looked at the "jog" in the plot and asked if the spacecraft would feel a "lurch" as it passed this point?

    It's not nearly as big a deal as, say, whether Pluto is a "planet" or not. Pick a label, pin the sticker on the rock, except in this case, the rocks are superclusters of galaxies.

    --

    Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.

    1. Re:Why Not? by mlewan · · Score: 5, Informative
      "If things started out as a big bang, on some scale, we will find a "center" of the universe. "

      I thought that was not the case. The big bang started in a point, but a point that is equally far from every other point in the universe, so there is no "centre". It is not a very intuitive statement, but that is what I understood from some article or other on the subject.

    2. Re:Why Not? by polar+red · · Score: 2, Insightful

      but a point that is equally far from every other point in the universe I guess that means that at a center point in non-time/non-space, time and space just started ... which means that at that moment, ALL space was a single point, which means that that point is now smeared all over the universe ? something along those lines ? Any1 a physicist here ?

      --
      Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
    3. Re:Why Not? by 2short · · Score: 1

      I can't make heads or tails of what "non-time/non-space" would mean :) But this part:

      "that point is now smeared all over the universe"

      is basically the deal.

    4. Re:Why Not? by DELNI-AA · · Score: 1

      If I remember correctly, an assumption underpinning the Big Bang theory is that all directions where equal. Now, if all directions are not equal at present time, that may be the result of many factors between Big Bang and now. However, should the alignment of 200 000 galaxies somehow depend on some event close to the Big Bang (as the uneven distribution of background radiation may indicate) then we may have to do some serious re-thinking

    5. Re:Why Not? by syntaxglitch · · Score: 1

      Finding the center of the universe would be like looking for a point on the surface of a balloon that's the center. Things don't work that way.

      If you want to know what direction the center of the universe is, it's either backwards on the time axis, or outside the universe in a direction perpendicular to all three spatial dimensions, depending on how you look at it. It certainly isn't a point in space.

    6. Re:Why Not? by norton_I · · Score: 1

      Currently, however, people think there is no center to the universe, and it is more than an academic distinction.

      Think of the universe as the surface of a balloon, and someone is blowing air into the balloon. Where is the center of the surface of the balloon? There isn't one. You can see that once the balloon was very small, but you can't "go to the place where the big bang happened" -- it was literally everywhere in the universe, only much closer together.

    7. Re:Why Not? by BigGar' · · Score: 1

      Also, there's Brane Cosmology where essentially the universe was created when two Branes collided. You may not have an initial point or center but a vast area where the collision occurred. This area of impact could, potentially, be the entire universe.

      --


      Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
    8. Re:Why Not? by shma · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Rather, the fact that the universe has no 'center' is a POSTULATE of big bang theory. The assumption is that the universe is isotropic and homogeneous, i.e. that the universe looks the same in any direction from any location. While this is obviously false on small scales (the center of the sun, for instance, does not look the same as a point on the surface of the earth), on scales large than the largest structures, on the order of hundreds of megaparsecs, you can begin to see evidence for it. The best evidence for isotropy comes from the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the same in any direction up to one part in 10^5. These small inhomogeneities in the background imply small inhomogeneities in mass density at the time it was created, 600,000 years after the big bang. Those regions of increased mass eventually formed the galaxies we see today. Getting back to your original question, assuming isotropy and homogeneity, there can obviously be no center of the universe, because it would have to stand out from other points. Likewise, if there was a preferred axis of revolution for all galaxies, then the universe would not be isotropic. That's why this claim is a bit difficult to accept, given the massive success of big bang theory.

      --
      I came here for a good argument
    9. Re:Why Not? by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 5, Informative

      > If things started out as a big bang, on some scale,
      > we will find a "center" of the universe.

      But understanding why this is so is what makes all of this fun.

      Remember that modern metric theories, of which General Relativity is just one, posit that the universe is four dimensional. Three space dimensions and one time dimension make up a four dimensional "spacetime". Unless you have seen an explaination of exactly what this means, it's just words, like "the universe is gizifa". This can lead to misunderstandings.

      I'll try to explain what this means, using a model I'm sure you've seen before, but likely poorly explained. Consider a balloon, partially inflated. The surface of the balloon, the "skin", is effectively a two dimensional object. The balloon as a whole is three dimensional. You have a two dimensional surface enclosing a three dimensional volume. Still with me?

      The reason we use this model is because it is very similar to our model of the universe. In this model everything you see around you, the three dimensional world, is the "surface" of a larger four dimensional construct. Just as the skin of a balloon is a 2D surface of a 3D space, everything you see around you is in the 3D skin of a 4D space. Still with me?

      Consider the balloon again. Critically, there is no "center" to the surface. Where is the middle of the surface of a sphere? Where is the middle of the surface of the Earth? The question itself is just "wrong". In the case of the Earth we arbitrarily decided to draw lines on it in certain placed, latitude and longitude. You could do the same with a balloon, make the neck the "north pole" for instance. By the same token we could have chosen some other coordinate system entirely, let's put the "west pole" in Ecuador!

      There is a point of the balloon as a whole that can be thought of as the center, through. Its in the space "below" the surface that's filled with air. The same is true of the Earth, the center is down below us, about 6400 km away. But, critically, that point does not lie on the surface.

      Now one more thing to consider. Draw some dots on the outside of the balloon. Label one of them "milky way". Now start inflating the balloon. You'll notice that the dots will move away from each other as you inflate them. In fact, from the point of view of the "milky way", all the other dots are moving away from it. But the same is true of all the other dots too. No matter which one you pick to observe, you'll see that everything moves away from it. And that's because, for lack of a better way to put it, space itself is getting bigger. In fact, the dots aren't really moving at all relative to their original locations on the surface of the balloon, their real motion is along a line drawn into the middle of the volume, that "real center".

      In the case of the universe the same thing applies. We look out in space and we see that everything is moving away from us. This is surprising if the universe is a 3D space, but complete expected if it's 4D. So where is the center of the universe? It's "down" somewhere. And what is that missing direction? Well we already said it, it's time. So what does that mean?

      That means the center of the universe is a point in time, not space.

      As soon as you really grasp this model you'll see why everyone likes it. For one, it trivially answers lots of different questions:

      1) why is everything moving away from us?
        it's not, everything is just "inflating"
      2) why do we appear to be in the middle?
        its just the way it looks, and it looks the same way everywhere else too
      3) why are we moving apart at all?
        because time is going forward (just look at your watch)

      Hope this helps!

      Maury

    10. Re:Why Not? by fluffhead · · Score: 0

      It's not true that the lines of latitude and longitude are entirely arbitrary, as they are conceptually fixed by the rotation of the Earth as it revolves around the Sun. The lines of longitude converge at the poles, which are defined as the two points on the sphere on the axis of the rotation of the Earth. The equator is defined as "zero latitude" and is the diameter of the sphere along the axis of rotation. The other lines of latitude are at right angles to the longitude lines. The angular measurements themselves (360 degrees), the names of "North" and the other directions, and the placement of the "prime meridian" of zero degrees longitude at Greenwich, England, all were essentially arbitrary historical / political / linguistic decisions.

      However if there is indeed a preferential direction of the spin axes of the majority of the galaxies in the universe, that might provide an analogous "universal North" direction... whether the cause is Big-Bang era spin related or simply inter-galactic gravitation and angular momentum conservation, similar to that already recognized in stellar systems (e.g. our own solar system) and planetary ring systems (e.g. Saturn).

      --

      #include "disclaim.h"
      "All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
    11. Re:Why Not? by YGingras · · Score: 1

      You are right but you fail to explain it in words that all can grasp. Think of raisin bread dough. This is the initial singularity; infinitely dense dough. The Big Bag, is the heating of said dough. As the raisin bread raises, all raisins will get farther from each others, and you won't find a point of radiation because there is none.

    12. Re:Why Not? by Ant+P. · · Score: 1

      It's not a correct statement either. If the distance of everything from the big bang was equal, someone would've noticed and found that point using simple trigonometry by now. Also the universe as we see it would be 2D.

    13. Re:Why Not? by Fallingcow · · Score: 1

      Getting back to your original question, assuming isotropy and homogeneity, there can obviously be no center of the universe, because it would have to stand out from other points.


      I am admittedly completely unqualified to debate this issue, but this statement seems to need clarification, or else it is false.

      A center does not, as far as I can tell, need to "stand out" in order to be the center. A circle can be said to have a center, though that point need not be any different (except in the property of position) from any other point in the circle. As I interpret your statement, you seem to be claiming that something that is homogeneous throughout cannot have a center, which is plainly false, so I'm guessing that I'm missing something here.

      Can you (or anyone else) help to make this more plain?
    14. Re:Why Not? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, if the universe is a balloon, when does it pop?

    15. Re:Why Not? by whisper_jeff · · Score: 1

      Please allow me to say thank you for that description. Clear and concise and interesting. Thank you.

    16. Re:Why Not? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Tuesday.

    17. Re:Why Not? by element-o.p. · · Score: 1

      If I had mod points and you weren't already at 5, Informative, I'd mod your post up. That is easily the clearest, most intuitive, most readable explanation of the expansion of the universe I have ever seen. Awesome job!

      --
      MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
    18. Re:Why Not? by Neo_piper · · Score: 1

      So the reason that this makes no sense is that I am not only moving forward in time from when you wrote it but the time BETWEEN when you wrote it and when it didn't make sense is also expanding, in a 4 dimensional way?

    19. Re:Why Not? by philipmather · · Score: 0

      If gyros (or their 2D equivalents, er...) were attached symmetrically about the surface of the balloon with their axis of rotation also being symmetrical would the balloon have any net angular momentum?

      My intuitive answer would be no, but what would would be the result on the net angular momentum of the balloon if the following variables were varied...

      1) placement of gyros between random and non-random.
      2) axis of rotation for identical, random & non-random.
      3) Physical properties of the balloon (size, shape & density for instance) ...finally, can the derived results of such observations be abstracted to an arbitrary region of space? Answers in a suitable publishing format to my email address, cheers. ;^)

      --
      Regards, Phil
    20. Re:Why Not? by cuby · · Score: 1

      Hi!
      Can we say, if the big bang started in a single point who expanded itself, and because we are still inside that expanding point (the universe), no real center exists because the universe is the center?

      --
      Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
    21. Re:Why Not? by Prune · · Score: 1

      Mod parent down for ignorant comments.

      If things started out as a big bang, on some scale, we will find a "center" of the universe.
      That's ridiculous. It's not a matter of scale, but a matter of dimension. The Big bang created not simply matter in space, but the space itself. Consider a reduction in dimension for purposes of illustration, and imagine instead of 3D space you have 2D space. The analogy is then the surface of a balloon. Draw dots on it for galaxies and blow up the balloon--the dots all move away from each other. Beyond the dimensional reduction, however, the analogy fails in that the balloon is embedded in space, whereas the universe is not, so though in the case of the balloon there's a center of expansion, which lies inside the balloon, in the case of the universe just that surface exists, there's no space inside/outside it and thus there's no location that is the center of expansion. Expansion is uniform and it is the space itself that is expanding, not matter moving through it. That is why objects outside our hubble volume are moving away from us at speeds greater than the speed of light--there's no limit to how fast space itself can expand, just matter's speed through space is limited.

      --
      "Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
    22. Re:Why Not? by GaryPatterson · · Score: 1

      Bear with me on this thought process, but here's my take on why there's no 'central point' in the Universe.

      Think of an ordinary rubber balloon before it's been inflated. It's a little piece of rubber. Consider that to be the Universe before the big bang. It's a 2D representation of space in this thought experiment because we're not allowing an 'up' or 'down' from the balloon's surface.

      Now inflate the balloon. The original balloon is still there, but now it's much larger. The 2D representation of space has been stretched out. The starting point (the uninflated balloon) is still there, and it's everywhere the inflated balloon is. There's no seperate starting point that someone on the balloon's surface can point to - it's the entire surface! There's no special frame of reference, and our balloon behaves nicely under relativity.

      It may help to put little stars on the balloon using a marker pen. If you can cram a few trillion on, it'll look pretty cool. Especially if you go for interesting structures and tiny swirly patterns.

      The tricky thing is that the balloon surface isn't 3D but 2D like Flatland. Repeating this thought experiment in full 3D with technicolour is more accurate, but very hard because the expansion happens as well in extra dimensions that we can't think in. It'd be like a solid balloon, but probably more of a lumpy sphere, which expands from an infinitely compressed point like a space-filling foam does.

    23. Re:Why Not? by Old+Wolf · · Score: 1

      ) why is everything moving away from us?
          it's not, everything is just "inflating"
      2) why do we appear to be in the middle?
          its just the way it looks, and it looks the same way everywhere else too
      3) why are we moving apart at all?
          because time is going forward (just look at your watch)


      Something's not quite right with this analogy. In the balloon example, the centre of the balloon is a point in space, and the balloon is expanding over time. If you try to say that the centre of the universe is a point in spacetime, you can't then say that the balloon is expanding as time increases.
      In fact, things don't "move through spacetime" at all. Time is intrinsic to spacetime; things have a fixed worldline.

      Perhaps a better analogy would be that the universe is a rubber band that's being stretched over the surface of a sphere (then add 2 dimensions). At the start (north pole) it was point-sized; now it is larger as it approaches the equator. The question of the shape of spacetime is: are we on a sphere, where the rubber band will get shorter after a halfway point, or are we on some sort of paraboloid where we approach a maximum size? Or even a cone where there is no maximum size?

    24. Re:Why Not? by Kaenneth · · Score: 1

      If the universe is like a balloon, what if instead of expanding forever, or 'crunch'ing together, it were to pop?

      Space suddenly shrinking away from a rupture, sections slapping against each other, as it is blown across the 'room' as it expells time from the rupture.

      Maybe there is a 'valve' where time can be added and released, to maintain pressure.

      Or, maybe it's a special type of balloon, made for a special purpose...

      Perhaps the Universe is the Whoopie Cushion of the Gods.

    25. Re:Why Not? by x2A · · Score: 1

      "Also the universe as we see it would be 2D"

      Nope, the universe would seem to be 2D if it was 3D, but the universe is actually 4D, so it looks to us to be 3D.

      "If the distance of everything from the big bang was equal, someone would've noticed and found that point using simple trigonometry by now"

      The distance to the big bang is measured in time, and you can get a rough idea of where it would be, as that's what the estimated age of the universe is; the distance to the big bang. The distance in space is measured as zero, ie, nothing has moved further away from where the big bang happened, only further away from other things within the universe. Again, go with the expanding balloon idea, with the distance from the surface to the center being time, and the two dimensions of the surface being space (ignoring one of the space dimensions to do this). All points on the surface are the same distance from the center (the same age), moving further from each other, but are still on the same bit of rubber that they were when the balloon was totally deflated (they haven't moved away from the rubber).

      Hope this helps.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    26. Re:Why Not? by x2A · · Score: 1

      Or, imagine the 2 dimensional surface of the earth (can go north/south, east/west. Forget flying/digging). Where's the center point? Whichever direction you travel in, you can keep going forever, there's no "end of the earth", and you can't have a middle without edges.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    27. Re:Why Not? by x2A · · Score: 1

      Backwards on the time axis?!! Jeez, what you trying to say, that the universe is already past middle age?! That's it, no more slashdot for me, I'm gonna start living while we have time left!

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    28. Re:Why Not? by x2A · · Score: 1

      "Currently, however, people think there is no center to the universe, and it is more than an academic distinction"

      Well, technically, no center "to space". If we take the universe as being 4D, the center would be half way between the beginning and the end of the universe (however, with an increasingly-expanding-universe model, there can be no middle, not because of the balloon thing, but because there's only one edge to one of the dimensions)

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    29. Re:Why Not? by tm2b · · Score: 1

      Getting back to your original question, assuming isotropy and homogeneity, there can obviously be no center of the universe, because it would have to stand out from other points.
      In other words, in single hot big bang model there can be no center of the universe because we assume that to be the case (for many reasons, many of which boil down to, "it sounds good and it makes the math easier").

      Which is kind of a problem. It holds up under the current crop of observations, but it really isn't iron-clad.
      --
      "It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
    30. Re:Why Not? by arminw · · Score: 1

      .....because we are still inside that expanding point (the universe), no real center exists........

      If the expanding universe is analogous to an expanding balloon, as it is often described, one could find the center of the balloon only if the dimensions of the balloon's diameter were measured. The balloon could still have a center, but it would not be locatable if the diameter of the balloon or even it's size cannot be determined.

      With present technology we seem to be able to observe a fall off in the amount of matter beyond a certain distance from us, but that doesn't mean this is where the edge of the universe (balloon) is located.

      --
      All theory is gray
    31. Re:Why Not? by arminw · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      ....So, if the universe is a balloon, when does it pop?.....

      When the guy who blew it up decides to stick a pin into it.

      --
      All theory is gray
    32. Re:Why Not? by Ironpoint · · Score: 1


      It is amazing to me that anyone who claims to wake up in the morning and stare out across his or her nose cannot identify a very explicit and easily observable 'center' of the universe which stands out from all other points and times.

    33. Re:Why Not? by junglee_iitk · · Score: 1

      Of the mods gone crazy! :(

      Don't worry... meta-mods are generally wiser.

    34. Re:Why Not? by Jookey · · Score: 1

      Correct me if I am wrong, but when Einstein said "there is no overall coordinate system that will be superior to all other coordinate systems." (assuming they are inertial and not accelerating) this was an axiom that he used to formulate special relativity and not a consequence of that formulation?

    35. Re:Why Not? by nlong · · Score: 0

      42 is the answer. So how quickly is everything expanding. If I could stop time inside a small box, and if inside this small box I place some shrinky-dinks made to look like little circus balloons, could I take the shrunken shrinky-dinks and pop them in the oven to make even smaller ones!? Science is exciting.

    36. Re:Why Not? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I am dumb in physics and astronomy. My friend forwarded this mail, which made me think about it. I have couple of questions on the analogy.
      "Draw some dots on the outside of the balloon" is this on the surface or above the source which not effected by inflating the balloon?
      Because
      a. If it is on the surface, then every dot will expand. That means is the earth expanding?
      b. If it above the surface, should not effected by inflation then should not feel the relative movement with in the milky way.
      c. If it is on the surface (but not part of surface) inflation, then the dot should feel the force of expansion.

    37. Re:Why Not? by shma · · Score: 1

      The property of position is exactly what makes the center of a circle different from the other points. It is the only point equidistant from every point on the circle. The same goes for the idea of a center of the universe. If you want to define a center of the universe is a non-arbitrary way, it should have some kind of property. Then I could argue that the universe is not isotropic everywhere because if I stand at any point away from the center, I can distinguish the line connecting me to the center from any other line. Sorry for the lateness of my reply.

      --
      I came here for a good argument
  26. Report is incorrect by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    200,000 elliptical galaxies are not all pointing in the same direction.

    I have it on good authority that 199,999 are pointing in one direction, and the other one is pointing in the opposite direction.

  27. Theory to explain it already exists. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    It is easily explained by the Theory of Intelligent Arranger.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:Theory to explain it already exists. by Surt · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Clearly this is all an attempt by another universe to build a giant spaghetti strainer using the black holes at the center of all these galaxies to try to kill our great protector the FSM http://www.venganza.org/.

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
    2. Re:Theory to explain it already exists. by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      The problem with this theory is that it cannot be tested. We don't have other samples to compare to.

      An intelligent arranger sounds quite logical in many ways. A lot of nature constants have to be JUST the way they are or the universe would not exist. The expansion speed of the universe and its mass has to be JUST the way they are or we wouldn't exist. Sounds all a lot like someone had to do this. Craft it. Create it. Put it into existance. Because so many thing have to be coincidentally "right" or we'd all not be here.

      The problem is that we could not observe a universe that was different. We simply would not exist. The problem with this theory is that we don't have any other universes to see whether it's really coincident or someone "adjusted" all those little variables to just the "right" level. Maybe this universe is the 10^100th try after a few 10^x years of trying and just now everything came out right. Could be, just as well. We can't see beyond the big bang and what (if anything) was there before.

      What also begs for an answer is the question what some intelligent arranger would get out of aligning those galaxies in some special way. What's his benefit? Just making it look nice? Sounds quite petty for someone who'd have to have quite awesome powers to create and align something like that. I don't want to believe in a God who's a supernatural interior designer with supernatural hubris.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    3. Re:Theory to explain it already exists. by Surt · · Score: 1

      Bad mod, bad! Not flamebait. Funny. Funny. No biscuit.

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
  28. I'm in. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    > > someone say something about galaxy-alignment overlords!
    >
    >I, for one, welcome our new gala... meh. Not worth it. You have a go.

    I'll play. How about this sentence from the PDF:

    "To study the distribution of (sigma) for random universes, I have generated 4000 such universes."

    Sure, we know he's talking about a computational simulation, but still... it's the kind of thing that would make your galaxy-alignment overlords, for themselves, welcome our supercomputing cosmologists, and remind us that they can be useful in producing asymmetries that will produce non-random distributions of ellipticities in galaxies some 13 billion years later.

    In all seriousness, the paper is a pretty impressive result. If there's a large scale structure to the universe, from whence did it originate? At/before the instant of hyperinflation? It must have been early and universe-sized to be correlated with the WMAP results and as such, over long enough timescales, to affect the shapes of the end products of series of galactic mergers.

    Back to our regularly scheduled slashschtick, I'm just glad we live in one of the more interesting universes. It's not turtles, turtles, turtles all the way down, it's cosmologists, cosmologists, cosmologists, all the way up!

    (I did OK, didn't I? I mean, there's at least two In Soviet Russia jokes that I just left there waiting for someone to pick up on... :)

    1. Re:I'm in. by Xybre · · Score: 1

      In soviet russia, galactic mergers timescale you!

      Achem.

      But really, I was wondering what sort of massive force could cause such a correlation. My own observations seem to indicate that certain structures are present at every level of scale. From fractal lattice crystals, to fluid dynamics ripples, perhaps such a structure reaches even higher to galaxies and superclusters.

      Maybe the whole universe is in one of these structures, held together by interference patterns of gravity waves creating "sockets" in which large structures can "fit" and create sympathetic wave deformations.

      --
      Eternity is a time bomb.
  29. What "intelligent design" - just big bang by unity100 · · Score: 0

    didnt big bang start from a point ? well you have found your point - wherever all of them have been pointing, it should be probably where it started.

    1. Re:What "intelligent design" - just big bang by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Now convince Christians, Muslims and Jews to fight over that point in space instead of Jerusalem.

  30. Re:quick by Xybre · · Score: 1

    Depends, are the nodes connected via quantum entanglement? If so, latency isn't really a problem.

    --
    Eternity is a time bomb.
  31. I think he means the Pioneer Anomaly by el_munkie · · Score: 1

    To the best of my recollection, various probes we have shot outside of the solar system just aren't where we should be according to Newton and even Einstein. Even factoring in various factors that could have thrown off the trajectory, nothing really accounts for the discrepancy other than a possible misunderstanding of how things work.

    This is from memory, though, so it may have been resolved by now.

  32. initial angular momentum? by peter303 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    An initial anagular momentum for the universe might prejudice galaxy formation.

  33. hmm by thatskinnyguy · · Score: 1

    It sounds as if there is another Universal Constant that has been discovered but not fully understood yet. Understanding of this incredible discovery could help us with scientific advancements on Earth for years to come.

    --
    The game.
    1. Re:hmm by dotbenjamin · · Score: 1

      That is the most uninteresting, bland, obvious and yet useless observation that anyone could have posted in reply to this story. Of all the interesting things one could say, you regurgitate words that you think might be related to the story and suggest some hitherto unmentioned beacon of hope that the news item may or may not have hinted at. And what, you want a +1 insightful for that?

      --
      Nothing like blowing your own trumpet.
    2. Re:hmm by thatskinnyguy · · Score: 1

      It incited you to do something didn't it?

      --
      The game.
  34. Protouniversal disc, maybe ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Maybe this axis belongs to a once existing "protouniversal" disc, similar to protoplanetary discs. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplanetary_disk

  35. It's soooooooo fucking obvious... by BronsCon · · Score: 3, Funny

    We're all being sucked into the same black hole!

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  36. A grain of deviant salt by epine · · Score: 1


    One does not cross paths with 13 standard deviations in an average universe.

    http://math2.org/math/stat/distributions/z-dist.ht m

    This calculator computes the area from -inf to 6.5 as 1.0000000016. Wow! Only half-way there and we've already spotted some dark matter.

    Open Office also buckles under the strain.

    =NORMDIST(7.96;0;1;1) reports
    9.9999999999999900000000000000000000]E-001

    =NORMDIST(8;0;1;1) reports
    10.0000000000000000000000000000000000]E+000

    I didn't think ordinary matter was supposed to get all the way to 10. Cool. We're now on the way to 11, boys and girls.

  37. Re:quick by azav · · Score: 1

    Step 3?

    3. PROFIT!

    --
    - Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
  38. Wasn't Us... by WED+Fan · · Score: 0, Troll

    The reason is quite clear.

    They are pointing, as if to say, "It wasn't us, He did it."

    Why does there have to be a reason?

    "Inconveniet Truth, Part 32" will state that the Universe is losing its alignment and the number of galaxies pointing in the same direction has dropped by .2% in the last eon. The cause? SUV's.

    --
    Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
    1. Re:Wasn't Us... by x2A · · Score: 1

      Damn troll made me laugh!

      (must be the truth, the alternative is a moderater with no sense of humour, absurd!)

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
  39. Sci-Fi called this back in 1980... by rah1420 · · Score: 1

    with a book by Gertrude Friedberg called "The Revolving Boy."

    Friedberg imagined what life would be like for someone who had an affinity towards this One True Direction.

    Good read.

    --
    Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
    1. Re:Sci-Fi called this back in 1980... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thanks for the book recommendation.

      Weirdly something similar keeps happening to me - I keep wanting to turn in a certain direction. (Yes, yes, I know I should probably see a neurologist, but it's very intermittent. For now I'll just settle down with a good escapist read.)

    2. Re:Sci-Fi called this back in 1980... by geekboy642 · · Score: 1

      I read that book when I was 12. Quite a good read, I thought. I should go find my copy again.

      --
      Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
  40. Are we one of them? by cyfer2000 · · Score: 1

    I read the abstract but there is no information about if we are one of them.

    --
    There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
    1. Re:Are we one of them? by bwcbwc · · Score: 1

      Actually, if you know your galaxies, the answer is "no, we aren't one of them". The Milky Way is a spiral (or possibly hybrid, based on recent studies) galaxy. This study addresses elliptical galaxies.

      --
      We are the 198 proof..
    2. Re:Are we one of them? by cyfer2000 · · Score: 1

      I have always been wondering, how do we know what our galaxy looks like?

      --
      There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
  41. Sigh, what a load of bollocks by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 1, Insightful
    200,000 galaxies sounds like a lot. But it's not. It's less than one part per thousand.

    And there's no way to tell how closely they're aligned, maybe many are 20-30 degrees off.

    Would you still call that aligned? Is it still significant if one in a thousand galaxies are within 30 degrees of each other in orientation? Who knows? Who cares?

    1. Re:Sigh, what a load of bollocks by IndustrialComplex · · Score: 1

      If their alignment is at most 20-30 degrees off then this would still be an interesting story. Let's assume they have a perfect shape, I would expect that there would be an even distribution from -90 to 90 degrees. ie: 180 degrees.

      Given that you should expect 180 degrees, a measurement that is accurate enough to determine that they are only varying by 60 degrees maximum is a pretty significant difference.

      --
      Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
    2. Re:Sigh, what a load of bollocks by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Suppose you toss a die 30 times and it comes up six all but one time. How many more times would you like to toss that die before you accept that it's not fair?

      One part per thousand is a pretty huge sample, 200,000 is a great sample size and thirteen standard deviations corresponds to a probability that it happened by chance of... actually, the precision of my calculator won't go down that far. Best I can do is 5 standard deviations, which is a probability less than 2.7 x 10^-7 of chance occurrence.

    3. Re:Sigh, what a load of bollocks by The+Master+Control+P · · Score: 1

      Wikipedia's article has values for 6 and 7 sigmas; I can't find confidence intervals for 8 or more on Google. I suppose you could use the GNU scientific math library and a step size of 1e-9 or 1e-10 to find it out... Anyway, 6 = 99.99999980268%, 7 = 99.99999999974%.

      PS: Why is slashdot afraid of characters outside UTF-8?

    4. Re:Sigh, what a load of bollocks by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Yeah... WAY too much work to reply to a random Slashdotter who doesn't understand stats.

      Actually, with a sample size of 200k out of about 200 billion, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you couldn't get a z=13 from a randomly oriented population even if you picked galaxies individually to fit your theory.

  42. Not even a drop in the bucket by gatkinso · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Talk to me at a trillion.

    --
    I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
  43. So did someone try... by E++99 · · Score: 1

    ...looking to see what they're all pointing at?

  44. Before we get too excited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Let's note that:

    1) This guy is a high-energy physicist, not an astronomer.

    2) He has two published articles on extragalactic astronomy, both from the early 90s, which have picked up a grand total of 4 citations.

    3) He has put up 3 papers on the arXiv in the last few months, all on this subject. None of them are stated to have been submitted for review, and indeed they are not in the style of any of the major relevant journals.

    Yeah, yeah, ad hominem and all that. I'll read it more carefully later if I have time (but I'm a bit busy writing a paper of my own, like, for submission and peer review and all that). He does appear to enjoy abusing statistics, both here and in his earlier papers.

    I just kinda think that Slashdot could report on all the many scientific discoveries that are actually likely to be true, rather than grand claims based on a couple of preprints by someone with little experience in the field.

    1. Re:Before we get too excited by MorpheousMarty · · Score: 2, Insightful

      At least the paper is written in such a way that it can be properly criticized. So many slashdot articles are along the lines: check this out, wouldn't it be cool if this crazy idea had some proof! Cosmic dust lifeforms comes to mind from a few days ago. It was an interesting read, and thank you for constructive criticism. Good luck on your paper, and please do check the numbers if you have the time... it seems he did control the numbers to get such a grand conclusion, but perhaps there is a statistically relevant phenomenon here.

    2. Re:Before we get too excited by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 1

      More likely is that he thought of it first and beat you to it.

      Shucks. Guess you don't get tenure.

      --
    3. Re:Before we get too excited by ivoras · · Score: 1

      I don't know you or the guy but I did spend a few hours on the Galaxyzoo sorting galaxies (pretty pictures and all that) and I did notice the same thing. I was thinking "is it me or there really is a preferred direction of the spin?" since before that (actually, before this /. article) I thought the direction of the spin should be random.

      I'm saying that the statements this guy makes are directly verifiable - anyone who wants to can look at the pictures and conclude the same. Except if there's some unobvious error (such as Galaxyzoo's server having a bias for spin directions), his observation is correct and it shouldn't matter that he doesn't have a reputation yet - the important thing is that he's not wrong.

      --
      -- Sig down
    4. Re:Before we get too excited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
      I'm not saying he should be dismissed because of his reputation (or lack thereof). My complaint is that such things send up red flags that should keep articles like this from being treated on Slashdot as verified scientific discoveries.

      The trouble with saying that "anyone who wants to can look at the pictures..." is that there's far more to astronomical data analysis than just downloading the raw data and running your favorite tests on them. The ellipticities in this sample, for example, are calculated in the data pipeline from a very simple geometrical measurement. To actually use them to find an effect this small requires additional reduction. For an idea of what's involved with this particular data set, take a look at this paper, which uses the same data towards a different end, but likewise requiring precise measurements of the ellipticity and position angles. As you can tell by a glance at section 2.2.2 (and references therein), there are a whole host of instrumental calibrations that have to be done and selection effects to be investigated, and which Dr. Longo ignores. (Someone upthread also mentioned some of these.)

      So the issue is not that Dr. Longo dares to work outside his field. It's that he doesn't seem to know how to go about doing what he wants to, and doesn't want to get his work checked by the people who are experienced in doing this kind of stuff and dealing with the nastiness that is modern astronomical instrument calibration. There are actually quite a few high energy folks who have made the switch from high energy to astrophysics (one is on my committee), and they learn that you can't take a list of raw numbers from a astronomical data catalog, run some binning and simple curve fitting on them, and expect to get a meaningful result any more than you could easily discover the top quark from the raw events list of a particle detector. Also, as I say, there is some dubious use of statistics, but the main point is that he's starting from data that simply isn't yet usable for his task.

      As far as your naked-eye hunches, I suspect that it's an unintentional selection bias (by you) or something. The idea of checking for galaxy alignments is not new--indeed, it's a fundamental test of cosmic isotropy--and an effect large enough to be noticed by the naked eye would've been measured by now. I don't doubt what you think you saw, but I do doubt that you could see a real effect that easily.

    5. Re:Before we get too excited by pldd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I guess that if a high-energy physicist can some of his time to learn some basic astrophysics (like measuring galaxies alignment). We clearly recognize the work of a particle physicist here: 1) Longo defines his measurement; 2) He selects and describes his sample; 3) He does his analysis by comparing the data with Monte Carlo data; 4) He concludes and indicates the confidence level of his analysis. That`s a pretty robust method which generates most results in experimental particle physics. If Longo`s analysis is correct, it could indicate a coupling between the angular momenta of the galaxies (like the spins of the nuclei in a solid which generate ferromagnetism through Ising coupling). There could be several domains of aligned galaxies in the Universe (since Longo looked only at a close region), like polycristallic iron. This discovery could even give us information about dark matter if we suppose that the galaxies are loosely aligned on a vector field. A wild hypothesis could be that this vector field is the (spin-1) interaction field of dark matter particles, which would be required to be fermions.

      --
      Formalize Formalism
    6. Re:Before we get too excited by xPsi · · Score: 1
      I totally agree with your point 3) as well as the last sentence. Because the arXiv is not peer reviewed, Slashdot should avoid promoting random papers from there. Even a peer reviewed paper needs to be digested by the community before getting widespread public "Eureka!" attention. There are enough amazing confrimed discoveries to discuss without tinkering around the corners of the arXiv.


      However, points 1) and 2) aren't particularly relevant. Come on. It isn't like he's a banker trying to write a scientific paper in a field totally orthogonal to his expertise. An interested, informed high energy physicist is certainly qualified to do the kind of analysis in the paper as presented. Granted, it doesn't mean the analysis is correct, but he is generally qualified to approach the problem -- and frequently interesting things can be learned when problems are approached by someone in a different subfield. What you say in point 2) is worse than ad hominem, its unscientific. You can't judge the merits of a new idea or observation based only on an author's past citation record. Science is a claim assessment tool, not a citation index. New ideas and observations, especially if testable, interesting, and presented responsibly, should be examined on their own merits using the scientific process.

      --
      i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
    7. Re:Before we get too excited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Nonsense. Sure, scientific results rise and fall on their own merits, and blah blah, but an author's background is a perfectly acceptable initial filtering criterion. When the background is largely or entirely unrelated to the science being done, we don't go running to Slashdot, which was my entire point. Instead, we take a look over the work, and when we see that the author fails to address important issues, be they theoretical or practical, we don't go trumpeting the results to the masses.

      I deleted from my inbox today an email from someone who has disproven the Uncertainty Principle. Of course, I didn't discard it simply because it was sent to me unsolicited by someone in China with a non-academic address, because that would be unscientific. He could be right, and have overturned quantum mechanics, because science is a claim assessment tool, not a citation index. So I looked at the first paragraph, saw that he mistated both the definition and the meaning of the Uncertainty Principle, while making some dubious assertions about the nature of quantum mechanics, thus indicating that he doesn't actually understand the very thing he claims to disprove. Thus having examined the work on its own merits, I deleted the email, rather than running to submit it to Slashdot.

      I don't think at all that Dr. Longo is a crackpot. But his background raises flags, particularly when one has seen many of these advanced-career physicists who move over into astronomy and quickly make grand discoveries. Points (1) and (2) do not make me disbelieve his results. They do make me look at the actual work, which makes me disbelieve his results.

      Again, all three points I made are relevant to whether this kind of thing should be announced in places like this. All three should make someone look into the actual science, or ask someone who can, before plastering it on a highly-read website, where it will be taken as fact by those who don't (through no fault of their own) know better. That was my concern, not whether he should be ignored by the scientific community. And I know, I've now spent far, far longer on this than I would have by just ignoring these posts myself. But while I don't come to Slashdot to learn astronomy, I'd prefer that the people who do learn things here get real science and not the fringe.

      I am "capable" of doing what my high energy colleagues do, in the sense that I can write the programs they can and fit the models they do. I am not "qualified", however, to take a stack of semi-reduced data from one of them and get a believable answer, because I don't know the systematics and subtleties. I've no doubt that Dr. Longo is perfectly capable of understanding astrophysics at the level required to interpret results from the data, but he demonstratably does not understand the reduction of Sloan data, as pointed out by various commenters here. His results are therefore highly suspect. The fact that he doesn't want to get it reviewed only makes things worse.

  45. Little discussion of instrumental systematics by JohnnyDanger · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This paper has no discussion of the ellipticities caused by imperfections in the telescope optics. This is a well known problem for weak gravitational lensing and cosmic shear measurements, which also use measured ellipticities. This problem can be corrected by using the stars (which should be round at the telescope resolution) to figure out and fix the distortions in the image.

    I have little direct experience with this, but I suspect that optical distortions could be the cause of the effect he is seeing. The universe may very well have some weird features, but this paper is not a careful analysis.

    1. Re:Little discussion of instrumental systematics by SpaceLifeForm · · Score: 1

      I agree. It can all be an illusion due to gravitational lensing.

      Space is tricky, there is more to it than meets the eye.

      --
      You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
  46. Re:quick by Orange+Crush · · Score: 1

    Depends, are the nodes connected via quantum entanglement? If so, latency isn't really a problem.

    Correct, latency isn't a problem since quantum entanglement can't transmit information at all. Remember--the speed of light abbreviates to S.O.L.

  47. Markers! by CoolAcid · · Score: 2, Funny

    The Vogons set these up - It's the marker lines for the new interstellar highway. Didn't you all read the details at the interstellar planning office on Alpha Centauri?

  48. All is clear to me now.... by PortHaven · · Score: 1

    I've been severely depressed and miserable most of my life. I've taken to the belief that this stems from mankind's failure of discovering Santa Claus at the North Pole.

    Now I understand, the north pole was not the northern pole of earth. But rather the universe. Now that we know the universe is aligned we simply need to determine which polar direction corresponds to north - then we will finally be able to discover Santa Claus and his elves.

    Rejoice...this is exceedingly great news!

  49. A quote from the PDF paper by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "In this paper I discuss only the magnitudes of the average ellipticities, not the orientation of their axes."

    Then he apparently goes on to discuss their orientation. Maybe it's a science thing.

  50. IAAP (I Am A Physicist), and... by JeanPaulBob · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...well, I have a MS in Physics, anyway. Well, Applied Physics. In semiconductors. Anyway...

    I think another poster said it a bit more intuitively, that the point is now smeared out everywhere. That sounds roughly right to me.

    Another thing to realize is that the Big Bang doesn't mean that an explosion happened in a single point in empty space, and then everything expanded outward. It's that space itself was compressed down into a single point, and then expanded. There was nothing outside the Big Bang for it to expand out into. Every point in the universe was infinitely closer together. All the energy was really close together--really dense--so it was really hot. Then as things got less dense, the temperature decreased. In one sense, everywhere is the center of the Big Bang.

    This is also why distant galaxies can be receding away from us faster than the speed of light. Because expansion doesn't mean that galaxies are moving through space. (In relativity, nothing can move through space faster than c.) Instead, the distance between us is increasing as space itself expands. (You can visualize that as making two marks with a pen on a deflated balloon, and then blowing up the balloon. The two marks don't move on the balloon, but they do get further apart.)

    1. Re:IAAP (I Am A Physicist), and... by radarsat1 · · Score: 1

      There was nothing outside the Big Bang for it to expand out into. Every point in the universe was infinitely closer together.


      Although I've understood this for some time, something that I've never quite been able to grasp is the following: How can points be "closer together" when the frame of reference is what you're talking about? It would required an outer frame of reference to be able to say that two points are closer together.

      That is, if two points are getting closer together, we say that the distance between them is shrinking. But if distance itself is what is shrinking, how can we say they are getting closer together?
    2. Re:IAAP (I Am A Physicist), and... by JeanPaulBob · · Score: 1

      I haven't really studied the math of General Relativity, so take this with a grain of salt.

      I don't think it's correct to say that distance itself is shrinking.

      The size of a proton, for instance, does not expand with cosmological inflation or shrink with deflation. Suppose expansion were to reverse toward a Big Crunch. All the galaxies are getting closer and closer, but the galaxies and stars themselves aren't shrinking. Suppose you're sitting there with a ruler. As space contracts and all the matter gets closer together, it would eventually get crushed by all the other matter being jam-packed against it--but it won't shrink.

      I'm not sure how to explain this in terms of the math--the distinctions between metrics of distance and the nature of space-time, etc. But I think what I've said is correct as far as it goes.

    3. Re:IAAP (I Am A Physicist), and... by 12357bd · · Score: 1

      We tend to rationalize the Big Bang as it seen from within space/time, so we say 'everything expanded outward' but if we 'look form the outside', the whole thing still can be considered a point, as the space/time is constrained within is own boundaries. In this view univers history becomes changes within a point, incomprehensible as it may be, is not more irrational than the assumed 'reality' of the singularity at time zero.

      --
      What's in a sig?
    4. Re:IAAP (I Am A Physicist), and... by hypersql · · Score: 2, Insightful

      For 1-D people that live in an expanding 2-D ring, everywhere is the center.
      For 2-D people that live on an expanding 3-D ballon, everywhere is the middle.
      We 3-D people live in an expanding 4-D universe, for us everywhere is the middle.

      That means if you go forever in the same direction,
      you will eventually end up where you started.

    5. Re:IAAP (I Am A Physicist), and... by x2A · · Score: 1

      Relatively speaking, the universe could be a constant size and everything in it getting smaller :-)

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    6. Re:IAAP (I Am A Physicist), and... by x2A · · Score: 1

      The surface of a balloon is only 2D. What makes the "everywhere is middle" argument here is not the number of dimensions, but the loop property of it (if you keep going, you end up where you started). Thus we can only say "everywhere is the middle" for our universe if we assume the universe shares that property. Otherwise, the universe could go on forever, in which case there's no middle (only a middle to the observable universe, which is wherever you are observing from), or has an edges which the middle can be defined from.

      Of course a looped universe doesn't necessarily imply we could keep travelling and get back here, due to expansion; the distance from one point, all the way round back to itself, expands faster than we could travel.

      Without agreeing on the shape of the universe, it makes no sense really to talk about absolute coordinates. The only "edge" that has shown to exist so far is an edge of time at time zero.

      (this is my intuition speaking here... it seems right, but I know how much trouble that can get you into when talking about things like the shape of the universe!)

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
  51. The universe knows... by BiloxiGeek · · Score: 1

    They're pointing at Waldo, he's finally been found!

    --
    Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
  52. Why would it by Moraelin · · Score: 5, Informative

    IANAAP either, but I see it like this: imagine you have 4 spinning tops in the corners of a square. (The spinning tops are the galaxies.) The square itself doesn't spin, but the round things in the corners do. If all 4 rotate in the same direction, the system has a decidedly non-zero angular momentum, namely the sum of the 4. You can also easily find a frame of reference (e.g., centered the centre of the square and with the X and Y axes aligned with the side of the square) that doesn't rotate, and measure everything relative to it.

    Or if it makes it easier to imagine, think of the science gag of having a very fast spinning flywheel in a suitcase. Ask someone to carry it for you, or leave it around and see if anyone tries to steal it. (Though these days it'll more likely be the blown up by the SWAT or whatever equivalent your country has.) If the suitcase is horizontal (lying on the side), someone's going to have a beast of a time trying to pick it up. Or if it's standing, they'll have a beast of a time taking a corner with it. Though the suitcase (universe) doesn't rotate, the flywheel (galaxy) in it does, and the angular momentum of it all is very much non-zero.

    Now think of a suitcase with 4 flywheels in it, or 200,000 little flywheels. The suitcase itself doesn't rotate, the centres of the wheels don't rotate around anything, but the total system has a total angular momentum. Anyone trying to mess with that piece of luggage is in for a bit of surprise.

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
    1. Re:Why would it by nschubach · · Score: 1

      If you had 200,000 tops inside a briefcase and you moved the briefcase, the the tops will attempt to stay in the same location and thus tilt. Right? Why do they do this? They have something keeping the bottom of the top in place. In this instance it's friction, but if say the known galaxies are actually spinning around a larger body of galaxies, wouldn't they tend to attract to that bigger mass? Since they could be rotating around this larger mass, they are in motion, but are being pulled back to this center point. Our viewpoint of this effect is so small though it may look as though they are all tilted the same angle, but they might be ever slightly off and "pointing" to a much larger point.

      That's my guess on the whole thing.

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
    2. Re:Why would it by arth1 · · Score: 1

      Now what I find interesting is the logical implications of the whole universe spinning. To go back to the analogy of a suitcase full of flywheels. Imagine if each flywheel is suspended inside a sphere or force field allowing the flywheels to align in any direction. What happens then when you turn a corner? The flywheels will keep their absolute orientation, and reorient relative to the suitcase. From within the suitcase, it would seem as all the flywheels suddenly decided to tilt 90 degrees.
      And what happens over time? Coriolis forces will cause all the flywheels to change their angular momentum, at slightly different rates depending on friction, which would over time cause everything to become "randomized". Think of a yo-yo spinning. At full speed, it will keep "pretty" stable, but rotate (twist sideways) just a tiny bit. As the speed decreases and the friction increases, it will rotate faster and faster. But ten people with ten yo-yos won't be able to ensure they rotate in sync. That's what should happen to galaxies over time, no matter whether everything started out on one plane or not -- given my very limited understanding of the universe.
      But what happens if you spin the suitcase? Wouldn't that that counteract the effect of the randomization? I think it would. Cause I can imagine that if the suitcase was full of non-spinning flywheels, and you gave the suitcase a spin, inertia would then eventually cause all the flywheels to start spinning. Those who were already aligned with the suitcase would spin faster, while others would eventually realign and increase their spin. Could this be what's happening to our universe?

      And, if this boggles the mind, how about this: The suitcase isn't just spinning around itself, it's also sitting in a cart on a ferris wheel, which we can't observe cause our universe doesn't extend beyond the suitcase. How would that affect the flywheels? Or the shape of the suitcase?

      Interesting questions, indeed.

    3. Re:Why would it by edittard · · Score: 1

      If all 4 rotate in the same direction, the system has a decidedly non-zero angular momentum, namely the sum of the 4.
      I'm not sure if you can sum angular momentums of separate objects rotating on separate axes like that.
      --
      At the bottom of the /. main page it says 'Yesterday's News'. Well they got that right.
    4. Re:Why would it by sxeraverx · · Score: 1

      No. Just, no. Your model would be more valid if you were standing on one of the tops, and trying to get another one to spin. The one you're on would start spinning too. You're trying to add energy from outside the system, which just doesn't work for a model of the universe. Nothing goes into or comes out of the universe.

    5. Re:Why would it by Dread_ed · · Score: 1

      I think you just explained why the room always spins counter-clockwise when I get drunk.

      --
      When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
  53. The turtles spin, man by Moraelin · · Score: 1

    Yeah, man, but those turtles spin. Or maybe the last one has a gramophone kinda thingie on top that rotates the Earth. I mean, if God made a mechanism that rotates the Sun on a pole around the turtle, not to mention the planets and stuff, it only takes an extra pair of cogs and a shaft to make the disc on the turtle spin too. It's like, totally awesome, dude ;)

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
  54. Maybe... by Peldor · · Score: 1

    We're just part of a really big (optical?) storage medium for some larger megaverse. Just grooves and pits in the disc as it were...

    1. Re:Maybe... by Arimus · · Score: 1

      Nah, we're the moisture which gets in between the layers and causes the data to get corrupted.

      When the final program runs (the output of which is a student's first attempt at Hello metaphysical creation) someone is going to be upset when the program just displays 42 before fading away into nothing.

      --
      --- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
  55. Just so you know.. by popeye44 · · Score: 1

    They ALL point to ME. Yes that's right the universe revolves around little ol me.

    --
    Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
  56. God, caught red-handed! by sonciwind · · Score: 2, Funny

    He went to a lot of trouble to make things look random and natural, but this is obviously just a bunch of copies he whipped out to fill up space. for(int i=0;i200000;i++)myEllipticalGalaxy.Clone();

    1. Re:God, caught red-handed! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He better not run the garbage collector: We'd all be SCREWED!

  57. Re:Think on a very basic level... by willijar · · Score: 2, Informative

    Energy is a scalar not a vector - no direction. Flow of energy (power) has a direction.

  58. Re:Think on a very basic level... by TheDarkener · · Score: 1

    So it takes our intervention to direct this alignment?

    --
    It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
  59. Re:quick by Xybre · · Score: 1

    Because controlling the spin of a quark over here and measuring it wayyyyy over there can't transmit data.
    Additionally, nothing can move faster than the speed of light, ever.

    --
    Eternity is a time bomb.
  60. Re:quick by Phase+Shifter · · Score: 1

    Imagine a beowulf cluster of 200,000 elliptical galaxies.
    All composed of hot grits.
    And in one of them, far, far away...
  61. I didn't mean just mass by Moraelin · · Score: 2, Informative

    I didn't mean just mass, as in, they tend to stay behind unless you push them. I meant angular momentum, as in, they tend to stay pointing in the same direction. That would happen even in a perfect vacuum.

    Well, anyway, the thing with the tops and the briefcase was probably just an unneeded tangent. (I do a lot of those.) The important part is that the total system has a non-zero total angular momentum even if the centres of the tops don't move.

    Of course, the galaxies themselves could still move around each other, or around the centre of mass, or, really, whatever. I don't know enough to rule that out. I'm just saying that even without that, if they're aligned, there _still_ would be a total angular momentum.

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
  62. Mods by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Please mod hot piece of ass up.

  63. Couldn't resist: by flimflam · · Score: 2, Funny

    actually centripetal force - centrifugal force is actually a convenient fiction Centrifugal Force
     
    --
    -- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
  64. Re:quick by Husgaard · · Score: 1

    Natalie Portman's pants are not big enough for entire galaxies...

  65. Frank Chu Reported It First! by Bob9113 · · Score: 1

    This phenomena has been heavily reported by the much maligned Frank Chu.

  66. From TFA by Kozar_The_Malignant · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the paper:

    "A discussion of possible causes for these alignments is beyond the scope of this paper. "

    The sentence abouve is followed by: "R. Buniy et al. (2006) discuss a universe that is not spherically symmetric due to magnetic fields or cosmic defects in the context of the CMB alignments. A large scale cosmic magnetic field acting on protogalaxies in the early stages of galaxy formation seems to provide a possible mechanism for explaining the elliptic and spiral spin alignments and has been proposed as a mechanism for causing the CMB alignments by Campanelli et al. 2006."

    i.e. We don't know.... i.e. but here a couple of ideas.

    --
    Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
    1. Re:From TFA by bckrispi · · Score: 1

      How much you want to bet that they point "Where the Precursors went".

      --
      Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
  67. Re:Think on a very basic level... by John+Bayko · · Score: 1

    1) Energy exists

    "Energy" is not a thing that exists. It is an abstract concept invented by physicists to make certain types of equations balance. Things can "have" energy in that they can be represented by one side of an equation, and have an effect on other things represented by the other side of the equation, but they are only media, such as electricity or moving matter, which have and transmit this conceptual attribute.

    If you want to talk about "pure energy" (being not part of a medium transmitting this attribute), you're using a definition of "energy" that has nothing in common with any scientific use of the term. Which may make you happy, many people get satisfaction from believing in mystical energies.

  68. Re:Think on a very basic level... by TheDarkener · · Score: 1

    If energy can be proven to exist by a balancing of two sides of an equation, how can you say it's a conceptual attribute? If it physically exists, at least to our scientific method of proving fact, since if you transfer it between two mediums... well, it's there! We can't just dismiss our scientific methods based on theories that it doesn't exist, or at least prove beyond our current system.

    --
    It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
  69. Everything is spinning by csouza.pt · · Score: 1

    This just occurred to me while thinking of Foucault's Pendulum... An Atom is spinning, The Earth is spinning, The Solar System is spinning, Our Galaxy is spinning; What's to say that the Universe isn't spinning? Geez, my head is spinning...

  70. Not by any significant measure by SlappyBastard · · Score: 1

    Knowledge actually travels very poorly over time. For example, we barely know anything about the world prior to the Renaissance. Once you get before the time of Charlemagne, we're talking about a handful of sources from any one culture, even the advanced ones like the Romans. And once you go before the Romans and the early Chinese there is practically nothing.

    Even really big knowledge like algebra (which 'round these parts is BIG stuff) is only 1100 years old. And even then, huge chunks of math figured out in the Middle Ages in the Middle East and India got lost.

    How much knowledge was lost every time the Library in Alexandria got torched? How much knowledge was probably lost when the Mongols sacked Baghdad? How much knowledge was lost when the Nazis started killing Jewish scientists?

    Knowledge has a terrible shelf life.

    --
    I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
    1. Re:Not by any significant measure by x2A · · Score: 1

      When did we discover how to make fire? How long have we been building for? Making clothes out of cotton?

      Maybe we don't know much about ancient cultures, but maybe the information has been lost because it's not really relevant or helpful to us... only of interest to historians? But technology, *handy* knowledge, that sticks with us, because it gets used. Imagine evolution, but applied to knowledge, knowledge that helps people survive survives, other knowledge dies out.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    2. Re:Not by any significant measure by SlappyBastard · · Score: 1

      "knowledge that helps people survive survives, other knowledge dies out."

      Yeah, because the formula from medieval India for rust-proof iron had no application. Greek fire probably wouldn't have been handy, either. Or huge portions of the Roman surgical practices. All utterly useless.

      There are other factors involved besides basic utility. For example, war. Vast amounts of knowledge have been lost thanks to war. As I said, how much knowledge was lost when the Germans decided to commit industrial-scale genocide? Keep in mind how many Nobel prizes and Fields medals have gone to Ashkenazi Jews. You're really telling me that we lost nothing of the collective knowledge in the Holocaust?

      Or are we just taking a Social Darwinist view that blitzkrieg was more valuable? After all, the Jews did decide it was more valuable, judging by the modern state of Israel.

      Also, don't forget that the basis of modern civilization is the agricultural revolutions of the late 1700s and the mid 1900s. When 2% (instead of 75%) of a society is making food, 98% get to work in industries that advance knowledge and technology. Anything that alters that balance will alter the transmission of knowledge.

      Put more simply, a lot more knowledge has been lost to depopulation and the collapse of civilizations than to simple lack of utility. It is only reasonable to assume the same will happen again.

      --
      I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
    3. Re:Not by any significant measure by x2A · · Score: 1

      If information is lost due to people dying in wars, then those people *didn't* survive, so the technology can't be said to have helped them survive if they didn't even survive, so that argument's kinda moot.

      Some information that DOES seem to have been lost though is knowledge as the the difference between a generalisation and a law. Yes, there are going to be some technologies that were lost for some other reasons that could be useful now (like we haven't found other ways of doing things), but that doesn't change "knowledge that helps people survive survives, other knowledge dies out".

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    4. Re:Not by any significant measure by SlappyBastard · · Score: 1

      "knowledge that helps people survive survives, other knowledge dies out" is a flawed argument on a practical level. The simple reason is that knowledge is not the only means whereby people survive. An inferior civilization can, and often does, overwhelm a superior civilization by weight of numbers, by disease and even by dumb luck.

      If all human civilization were wiped out tomorrow and all its knowledge were to disappear with it, that does not negate the value of the knowledge lost, or even imply the collapse was the fault of technologies they used. At best it implies maybe we needed a little more knowledge.

      --
      I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
    5. Re:Not by any significant measure by x2A · · Score: 1

      I see my hint as to "the difference between a generalisation and a law" was too subtle, allow me to be more verbose: yes generalisations have exceptions, that's why they're generalisations not laws! It's like arguing against the statement that "cancer kills" because not everybody who gets cancer dies from it.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    6. Re:Not by any significant measure by SlappyBastard · · Score: 1

      Well, my apologies for not fully comprehending your articulate approach to pointless generalizations that have enough outs built in to make you feel safe in your argument.

      --
      I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
    7. Re:Not by any significant measure by x2A · · Score: 1

      Pointless, and you not understanding the point, are completely different, nevertheless, I understand you did your best, and so accept your apology.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
  71. Experimental Verification Required by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > Or if it makes it easier to imagine, think of the science gag of having a very fast spinning flywheel in a suitcase. Ask someone to carry it for you, or leave it around and see if anyone tries to steal it.

    Anyone know where I can get a suitable flywheel? I'm sure I could get an old briefcase somewhere...

    1. Re:Experimental Verification Required by bcmm · · Score: 1

      If you find out, tell me. :)

      --
      # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
      Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
  72. What happens if that balloon pops? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've always wanted to know that.

  73. Old astrophysics joke... by Dusty101 · · Score: 1

    Two galaxies walk into a pub.

    Landlord (to first galaxy): I'll serve you, but not your friend.

    First galaxy: Why not?

    Landlord: Because he's barred!

  74. linear thinking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    "that 200,000 elliptical galaxies are aligned in the same direction"

    Or we are looking at the galaxies in the same direction, considering space warps.

    It's all about the reference point.

  75. starcon.... by zmichalka · · Score: 1

    kind of like starcontrol 2... with the rainbow worlds... anyone following?

  76. OMG! I think I know why! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well, remember -- "If they are not with us, they are against us!" -- This so called 'axis' might just very well be 'the Axis-of-Evil' everyone was talking about a couple of years ago!

    Someone in Kentucky has proven that whole galaxies are against us!

  77. you have seen this ad... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "200,000 Elliptical Galaxies can't be wrong!" :-P

  78. Forget "why?" I wanna know "What!!???" by ukemike · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Everyone is asking "why?" as in "Why are they aligned." My first thought was, "What the hell are they all pointing at?" Is it God? Is it the Restaurant at the End of the Universe? Is it Mecca? Maybe it is just a REALLY big magnet. The answer to the 'what' question might go a long way toward answering the 'why' question.

    Anyway since I don't think that galaxies are likely to change their orientation, and remain tidy spiral galaxies, this suggests that there was a common influence on the creation of all of these galaxies!

    --
    -- QED
  79. hmmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    its because galaxies are mental fabrications.

  80. Newton's Bucket Argument by RulerOf · · Score: 1

    All this talk of angular momentum and centripital force keeps making me think of what I've just started reading about: Newton's Bucket Argument.

    If you don't know it, it has had physicists arguing about the nature of space, and naturally, angular momentum, for roughly 300 years. If you want to make your physics questions even more... hairy, think about them in the context of Newton's Bucket, and you'll really have something to wrap your head around ;)

    --
    Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
  81. Re:Frozed pees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In Soviet Russia, the Universe forms YOU!

  82. Re:Think on a very basic level... by OneSmartFellow · · Score: 1

    energy is subject to time, which makes it a vector.

  83. Re:quick by x2A · · Score: 1

    "Because controlling the spin of a quark over here and measuring it wayyyyy over there can't transmit data"

    Well it can, if you send the quark that you've controlled the spin of... but that might take some time.

    --
    The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
  84. Random Noise Order? by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 1

    How many elliptical galaxies are there? There are about 130 billion galaxies in the observable universe, so 200,000 is just about 1.5 millionth of all of them. The paper started with 390,000 galaxies, for reasons I couldn't decipher, from which it selected these uniformly oriented galaxies. But if the odds of them being mutually aligned is about 1 in a million, and the resolution of all their possible alignments is less that 1 per million, than this ordering seems inevitable, and just a self-selection from a randomly oriented large sample.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  85. It's the first lure of the rosetta by gregor-e · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In an oscillating universe, intelligence that is around at the end of a 'big crunch' will, of course, attempt to arrange things so that out of the next 'big bang', intelligence will precipitate sooner and will have some sort of leg up on understanding what is going on. So, kind of like the guy in the movie 'Momento', they tattoo the universe in ways that they hope will ultimately be decipherable to a future naive intelligence. Communication via matter arrangement preceeding a 'big crunch' is a pretty tough thing to pull off. One doesn't know what the future precipitant intelligence will think like and I suspect it is pretty difficult to encode specific messages, the hardest perhaps being the message that prods the precipitants into reading your dammned message in the first place. Creating a fundamentally huge, glowing neon arrow telling the precipitants where to start might be as simple as creating unbelievably improbable arrangements of matter. As we look closer, we may find ever more statistically improbable arrangements, layered in a complex way.

    1. Re:It's the first lure of the rosetta by Tzarius · · Score: 1

      Nice! That's actually a pretty intriguing idea - if not a good basis for some scifi!

  86. Schonflies group by Latent+Heat · · Score: 1

    You see, Khan had 2-dimensional thinking, so the Defiant was piloted according the planar Lie group. Kirk hit upon using the Schonflies group that adds a displacement out of the plane while still keeping his ship pointed properly "up", getting the jump on Khan in the nebula.

  87. Coriolis effect? by neurolux · · Score: 1

    I know Kurt Godel theorized that the universe is rotating. Maybe the orientation of these galaxies is due to some cosmic Coriolis effect.

  88. mod up ! Re:initial angular momentum? by cathector · · Score: 1

    mod up !
    one of the very few posts with actual physics thinking in this whole tawdry discussion.

  89. Heh by Moraelin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Heh. I didn't say that you could pick up the universe and run with it, like with a suitcase, or whatever you imagined there. The thing about flipping the suitcase was just a simple experiment to show that the complete system has an angular momentum even if just a part of it spins. I'm not saying someone could turn the whole universe. Just that it can have a non-zero total angular momentum, if all galaxies rotate the same way.

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    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
  90. Re:Forget "why?" I wanna know "What!!???" by Daychilde · · Score: 1

    "What the hell are they all pointing at?" ...surely, "away from" is more likely...

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    A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
  91. Beads? by FoamingToad · · Score: 1

    That'll be that superstring theory I've been hearing about.

    F_T

  92. He is probably a crackpot by anandsr · · Score: 1

    He has been trying to prove some kind of handedness in all his papers. One look at his list of papers will give an overwhelming feeling of him being a crackpot.

  93. Questions by master_p · · Score: 1

    Does matter itself expand? Do galaxies and celestial bodies become bigger as the universe expands? or it is only the space between matter that expands? what about the space between particles?

    1. Re:Questions by JeanPaulBob · · Score: 1

      Again, with the caveat that I haven't actually done any cosmology coursework, so I could be wrong:

      Does matter itself expand?

      No.

      Do galaxies and celestial bodies become bigger as the universe expands?

      No. Galaxies and celestial bodies (including clusters of galaxies) are gravitationally bound. Even though the space inside a galaxy is expanding (so that you would expect the stars to get further apart), this is counteracted by their gravitational interaction. So they stay together. Same thing for clusters of galaxies.

      or it is only the space between matter that expands?

      Right.

      what about the space between particles?

      Same thing. A molecule, atom, or nucleon (proton/neutron) is in the same situation as a galaxy. The space between individual bits of matter gets bigger, but their attraction counteracts that--whether it comes from gravitational, electromagnetic, or strong and weak nuclear forces--so that they stay together.

  94. Whatever you do by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't start spinning the other way around. We'll all fall off...

  95. not quite by rucs_hack · · Score: 1

    In many cases that term is used not because you don't know, or don't think you can find out, but instead to say simply that you don't have the time within the context of the current research to lay out a decent hypothesis, or prepare some defensible proof.

    I've used the term several times in publications simply because some work progresses to a deadline, and you have to halt and publish, often before you did everything you wanted to.

  96. up and down side by PermanentMarker · · Score: 1

    intresting it means the big bang had a 'direction', like an up and downside.
    Or matter lined up perhaps in an early magnetic field caused early orientation.

    Or matter lines up because of dark energy ?

    --
    I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
  97. Mach's Principle does not apply by GammaRay+Rob · · Score: 1

    Although Einstein wanted to show that Mach's Principle applied to the universe (which is what the Parent Poster was implying), he couldn't make it work in the framework of General Relativity. Essentially, we only feel the net force of matter within our horizon (defined loosely as the portion of the Universe visible to us since the beginning of time) and move accordingly. A portion of the Universe with net angular momentum that is non-zero is not ruled out in GR, spiral galaxies are an example on one length scale; this new result carries this to a much larger scale!

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    This line no sig
  98. Re:quick by Xybre · · Score: 1

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

    Current theories state that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light, regardless of all the cool things quantum physics can do, which is a shame really.

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    Eternity is a time bomb.
  99. Dark area of the universe by Draders · · Score: 1

    Perhaps they point to or away from that really dark area of the universe... which could be a bigger black hole and our galaxies are part of an even bigger galaxy... or over time they just settled that way as the article said they were all old red stars so they just aligned with all the forces acting on them which perhaps the spiral galaxies have greater influence over them then themselves.

  100. Re:quick by x2A · · Score: 1

    Which is why I said it would take a while to send the quark carrying the information, as you can't send it faster than C. Plus entanglement doesn't really add any benefits, the information would still have to be encoded into spin/etc before the quarks are sent, so it would still take as long as it takes for the quarks to travel the distance to transmit the information.

    --
    The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
  101. False Alarm by mtgradwell · · Score: 1
    There's been some interesting discussion here, so it's kind-of unfortunate that the paper has been withdrawn because of "the discovery of a serious bias resulting from the systematic dimming of galaxies with larger ellipticities away from the North Galactic Pole. Thus the conclusion that there is a special axis along which the elliptical galaxies tend to be aligned is incorrect."

    Just follow the link to the abstract. I'm surprised that nobody else seems to have noticed. I tried to download the preprint for future reference about half a day ago and got "The author has provided no source to generate PDF, and no PDF."

    Oh well. It'll get interesting when the real anisotropy is discovered, but for now we can all settle back down in our seats. Panic's over.

  102. Some corrections by paladinwannabe2 · · Score: 1

    Nobody even fully understands gravity even though the current understanding was presented by Newton and is known to break down as soon as you apply it to more than one body of approximately equal mass.
    True, we still don't fully understand gravity. However, we have gone much beyond Newton in terms of our understanding, mostly thanks to Einstein's theories of general relativity. Neither theory breaks down when applied to more than one body, but the mathematics behind it start to get REALLY HARD. In CompSci terms, the run-time complexity of a computer program running a multi-body system is O(n^n). Even before computers, though, dedicated mathematicians could and did solve such equations. For instance, Neptune was found due to an astronomer calculating where a planet would need to be to produce the oddities observed in the orbit of Uranus, a clear example of the accuracy of Newton's Laws even in a multi-body system.
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    You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.