Bogsnorkler said:
better article
https://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/2020-06/study-suggests-universe-has-defined-structure.html
OK, not dipole. They do not claim that the universe has a spin axis. Which is good because that would lead to problems.
There is, as they say, a possible quadrupole motion. But the whole purpose of cosmic inflation is to flatten out such motion to zero.
> The concept of cosmological multipoles is not new. Previous space-based observatories — such as the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, satellite; the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP mission; and the Planck observatory — showed that the cosmic microwave background, which is electromagnetic radiation from the very early universe, also exhibits multiple poles. But the measurement of the cosmic microwave background is sensitive to foreground contamination — such as the obstruction of the Milky Way — and cannot show how these poles changed over time. The asymmetry between spin directions of spiral galaxies is a measurement that is not sensitive to obstruction.
OK.
> The patterns span over more than 4 billion light-years, but the asymmetry in that range is not uniform. The study found that the asymmetry gets higher when the galaxies are more distant from Earth, which shows that the early universe was more consistent and less chaotic than the current universe.
I can’t accept that. There is a certain elementary law of physics called the “conservation of angular momentum”. If the early universe exhibited a quadrupole spin then the recent universe has to, too. And vice versa.
> The difference is small, just over 2%, but with the high number of galaxies, there is a probability of less than 1 to 4 billion to have such asymmetry by chance, according to Shamir’s research.
I need to read the technical paper. This may be it. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.11735.pdf “Asymmetry between galaxies with different spin patterns: A comparison between COSMOS, SDSS, and Pan-STARRS”
Here’s the raw data. Comparing clockwise blue and anticlockwise red spin of galaxies by redshift. No significant difference between number of clockwise and anticlockwise spins. So no dipole spin. The paper doesn’t actually calculate quadrupole or higher moments, so perhaps that’s in a later paper. I don’t trust the author’s significance tests in the paper. His/her standard deviations look too small, and the claimed mean spin for the SDSS data fails to match from the PanSTARRS data. By that I mean that the difference between the SDSS spins and that PanSTARRS spins is 20 times as large as the claimed difference between clockwise and anticlockwise spins.
