Sixty percent of the oldest known galaxies seem to be rotating clockwise an asymmetry so extreme that one scientist described “any person looking at the image can see it.” The result, based on 263 galaxies imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), is prompting astrophysicists to rethink one of cosmology’s founding assumptions: that, on the grandest scales, the universe has no preferred direction.
In a perfectly isotropic universe, clockwise and counterclockwise rotations ought to be equally divided. But the Webb observations, extending back to galaxies that assembled 300 million years after the Big Bang, exhibit a statistically meaningful skew roughly two-thirds clockwise, one-third counterclockwise. Lior Shamir, Kansas State University associate professor of computer science and the study’s lead author, measured the asymmetry with a symmetric image-analyzing algorithm, known as Ganalyzer, which translates each galaxy’s spiral arms into a radial intensity plot in order to ascertain direction of curvature. “It is still not clear what causes this to happen,” Shamir said, “but one explanation is that the universe was born rotating.”
That description is the companion to an iconoclastic model referred to as black hole cosmology, or Schwarzschild cosmology, that suggests that all of our observable universe resides within the event horizon of a supermassive black hole in a “parent” universe. Coined by Raj Kumar Pathria and me. J. Good, and built on by theorists such as Nikodem Poplawski, the model substitutes the singularity at the center of a black hole with a bounce a condition of finite but enormously high density in which torsion, a spacetime twist in Einstein–Cartan theory, prevents collapse and initiates expansion. “A preferred axis in our universe, inherited by the axis of rotation of its parent black hole, might have influenced the rotation dynamics of galaxies,” Poplawski said. On this account, the Big Bang is the bounce from a collapse, and the arrow of time itself may be inherited from the parent universe.
Black hole interior physics makes the comparison more than poetic. At the event horizon the Schwarzschild radius space and time exchange roles, compelling all trajectories inwards just as time compels all events towards the future. Inward, so general relativity predicts, matter is inevitably pushed towards the singularity. In rotating (Kerr) black holes, frame-dragging effects curl spacetime itself, possibly imparting a global spin to any “baby universe” born inside. If our universe formed from a Kerr black hole so ultra-dense, its acquired angular momentum might take the form of the cosmological spin bias that Webb is presently observing.
Other explanations are still on the table. One is observational bias due to the Doppler effect: since the Milky Way is rotating, galaxies with opposite rotation to our own might be somewhat brighter and hence overrepresented in deep surveys. This bias may be exaggerated close to the Galactic poles, where the JADES field is located. Shamir pointed out that if this were the reason, “we will need to re‑calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” a shift that could cascade into other mysteries like the Hubble tension the discrepancy between independent measurements of the rate at which the universe is expanding and the unexpected maturity of massive galaxies at high redshift.
The Webb finding also crosses over with a decades-long effort of galactic spin orientation in the cosmic web. Tidal torque theory dictates that protogalaxies gain angular momentum from the local large‑scale gravitational field, producing correlations between spin axes and dark matter filaments. Observations of surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys have detected weak but significant correlations, usually in galaxy mass and environment. The strong asymmetry at record distances hinted at by Webb might suggest that such correlations were more prevalent early in the universe or that some other completely different process, such as the rotating-universe origin, existed from the beginning.
Critics warn that the present sample size, as unprecedented in depth as it is, remains minute compared to the billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Earlier large-area surveys based on millions of galaxies have typically detected no statistically significant global spin preference, or have explained apparent trends as human classification bias or algorithmic selection effects. The Webb team’s reliance on an automated, symmetric algorithm goes some way towards alleviating these concerns, yet independent replication using other deep-field datasets will be critical.
If the asymmetry withstands additional scrutiny, it might indicate a breakdown of the cosmological principle and compel a reexamination of the universe’s early conditions. Whether resulting from the wrapped spacetime of a parent black hole, from an unrecognized bias in our equipment, or from new physics in the early cosmic web, the finding highlights Webb’s ability to explore not only the universe’s contents, but also the laws that govern its very fabric.
