A Scientist Says Humans Might Be Trapped in a Gigantic Black Hole. It Isn't Crazy.
Observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope showed that more galaxies rotate in one direction than the other.
According to one researcher, this could mean that the universe is actually inside an unfathomably huge black hole, and that most objects rotate in the direction the black hole is rotating
It is also possible that we are biased—only seeing other galaxies as rotating a certain way because of how Earth rotates around the center of the Milky Way.
Black holes have such extreme gravity that not even light can escape. They have been caught shredding entire stars and can even devour other black holes. And now, one scientist thinks there's a chance that our universe may have existed unscathed for tens of billions of years inside one super-super-supermassive black hole.
Observations from JADES, the James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, led Lior Shamir—a researcher from Kansas State University—to suggest this out-of-this-world idea. Shamir took a closer look at 263 galaxies seen by JADES, which showed up clearly enough to make out their rotation based on their shapes. He identified that about two thirds of these galaxies as rotating in the opposite direction to the Milky Way is rotating in.
If the universe is truly random (whether it actually is continues to be an ongoing debate), it is thought that there should be an approximately equal amount of galaxies rotating in both direction, so the find is surprising.
Shamir's earlier research using data from Earth-based telescopes found that the further out you observe, the greater the difference between the number of galaxies that rotate in opposite directions, with the amount of clockwise galaxies being higher. Luminosity helped determine the direction a galaxy was rotating in. He applied an algorithm that identified how a galaxy was rotating based on its arms—the brightest parts of its anatomy.
'If the observation shown here indeed reflects the structure of the universe, it shows that the early universe was more homogeneous in terms of the directions towards which galaxies rotate, and becomes more chaotic over time,' Shamir said in a study recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Chaos in the universe may have caused more galaxies to rotate in different directions over time. However, it has been theorized that the universe itself is rotating. This idea is related to the theory of black hole cosmology, which views the universe as being inside a gargantuan black hole. The rotation of the black hole influences the rotation of the universe. This would also give our universe an axis. If a universe is rotating on its axis in the preferred direction of the black hole, it could explain why so many more galaxies are rotating in one direction than the other.
There is still a margin for error, however. Even with the powerful eye of JWST, it was not possible to determine a direction of rotation for some galaxies, and resolving that may (or may not) change the difference between how many rotate one way and how many rotate the other way. Shamir also has an alternative reason as to why so many galaxies seem to be spinning in the opposite direction of the Milky Way—maybe we are just biased because we happen to be observing everything from Earth.
'Another explanation could be that the distribution of galaxy direction of rotation in the universe is random, but only seems non-random to an Earth-based observer,' he said in the same study. 'In that case, the observation can be explained by the effect of the rotational velocity of the observed galaxies relative to the rotational velocity of Earth around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.'
There is, of course, a glaring question. If the entire universe really is inside a black hole, how come it wasn't pulverized into dust eons ago? Let that keep you up at night.
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