Do galaxies all rotate in same direction? Because...

Sn@kebite

I was thinking if galaxies spin in the same direction, would that mean the universe is a sphere? - you know the way in the northern hemishpere (of earth) the water goes down the plug clock-wise (i think).
Well if galaxies rotate clockwise could it mean we might be on the northern hemisphere of the universe?

mathias

Surely clockwise , anticlockwise , is a perspective thing , and its going to be relative to your position which one it is , you can see galaxies wherever you look , so its pointless to put a rotational direction on them.

Oh and the plughole thing is a myth !

Victor

Realise that in the universe, there is no up and down. So looking at each galaxy in a certain direction, they all rotate clockwise, looking at the other side the rotate anti-clockwise.

If that answers your point.

The Hill Billy

Here's an extract from the Galaxy Zoo website:

Observing the rotation of galaxies ... provides a probe of the large-scale properties of the Universe, and intriguingly there is already some indication from SDSS [Sloan Digital Sky Survey] galaxies that all may not be as it seems! Our current theories about the Universe have it that galaxies should not prefer to rotate one way or the other, and we should therefore observe as many clockwise rotating spiral galaxies as anti-clockwise. This is related to a fundamental assumption we make in cosmology; that there are no special places or special directions in the Universe. Prof. Micheal Longo from the University of Michigan has claimed, in his recent astro-ph preprint, that there is a preferred handedness (rotation direction) of galaxies in the local Universe. This is a revolutionary claim, that could force us to rethink our understanding about the underlying nature of space and employ a much more complicated background model for the Universe. The current claim is based on a sample of just 1660 galaxies from the SDSS survey, but a much larger sample is required to assess the significance of the effect...

Flukey

It's always one of the little conveniences in science fiction shows, the way the spaceships always meet on the same plane.:)