In our world, things rarely really stay static, especially when it comes to spinning. The earth, of course, revolves around itself and then around the sun. The sun also rotates about once every 27 days. It takes the entire solar system about 230 million years to complete one round around the galactic center. Of course, because our galaxy, the Milky Way, also rotates.
But does this continue with this rotation of even the largest scales and sizes in the universe? This was not previously known. The team now has according to “Nature of Astronomy” magazine found signs that cosmic web threads rotate.
The cosmic web describes the large-scale distribution of matter in our universe. The distribution of matter is largely the same network, where galactic filaments surround huge empty spaces called voids. These threads are connected Galaxy clusters plus superclusters with each other and at the same time contain galaxies. The filaments themselves can be thought of as cylindrical filaments that can span hundreds of millions of light-years, and seem to connect groups at their ends.
Redshift reveals whether cosmic filaments rotate
Peng Wang of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam and colleagues investigated whether these massive filaments also rotate. The team initially assumed that if the filaments did this, they would likely rotate about their longitudinal axis. Then it compared the redshifts of the galaxies in the regions above and below this hypothetical axis of rotation. The red or blue shift It is a measure of whether a celestial body is moving away from us or moving toward us. If the thread does not rotate, then there should not be much difference between the redshifts of galaxies perpendicular to the axis of one thread. On the other hand, the difference between the respective sides of the assumed spin axis indicates that the filament is spinning.
Because cosmic filaments do not present themselves accurately to terrestrial observers from the same perspective, the researchers evaluated thousands of filaments together in order to find indications of this spin signal. And they found what they were looking for: the filaments actually appear to be spinning, with the signal – the difference in redshift – strongly dependent on the viewing angle. It was more noticeable for the strands we seem to be looking at vertically. According to this, it is possible for other threads to rotate as well, but this cannot be seen and measured well from the ground.
Peng Wang’s team is evaluating its results as an indication that torque can also be generated on cosmic scales, i.e. mega scales. In the opposite direction, the cosmic web and especially its filaments are known to influence the formation and evolution of galaxies – especially with regard to the direction of their rotation. But this analysis does not reveal how the universe and cosmic threads shaped their relationship. It remains to be clarified how such massive structures can and seem to be rotated.
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