Evidence for a Preferred Handedness of Spiral Galaxies

Details Evidence for a Preferred Handedness of Spiral Galaxies Evidence for a Preferred Handedness of Spiral Galaxies

2009-04-16

arxiv.org/abs/0904.2529v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

Increased data sample by factor of 7. Fit to dipole without prior assumptions or binning gives probability of 1.5x10-4

Scientific paper

In this article I extend an earlier study of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to investigate whether the universe has an overall handedness. A preference for spiral galaxies in one sector of the sky to be left-handed or right-handed spirals would indicate a parity-violating asymmetry in the overall universe and a preferred axis. The previous study used 2616 spiral galaxies with redshifts <0.04 and identified handedness. The new study uses 15158 with redshifts <0.085 and obtains very similar results to the first with a signal exceeding 5 sigma, corresponding to a probability ~2.5x10-7 for occurring by chance. A similar asymmetry is seen in the Southern Galaxy spin catalog of Iye and Sugai. The axis of the dipole asymmetry lies at approx. (l, b) =(52 d, 68.5 d), roughly along that of our Galaxy and close to alignments observed in the WMAP cosmic microwave background distributions.

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