Asymmetry between Galaxy Apparent Magnitudes Shows a Possible Tension between Physical Properties of Galaxies and Their Rotational Velocity

Abstract

Despite over a century of research, the physics of galaxy rotation is not yet fully understood, and there is a clear discrepancy between the observed mass of galaxies and their rotational velocity. Here, we report on another observation of tension between the physical properties of galaxies and their rotational velocity. We compare the apparent magnitude of galaxies and find a statistically significant asymmetry between galaxies that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way and galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way. While asymmetry in the brightness is expected due to the Doppler shift effect, such asymmetry is expected to be subtle. The observations shown here suggest that the magnitude difference is sufficiently large to be detected by Earth-based telescopes. The asymmetry is consistent in both the northern and southern galactic poles. The difference is also consistent across several different instruments such as DECam, SDSS, Pan-STARRS, and HST as well as different annotation methods, which include automatic, manual, or crowdsourcing annotations through “Galaxy Zoo”. The observation can also explain other anomalies such as the Ho tension. Analysis of Ia supernovae where the host galaxies rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way shows a much smaller tension with the Ho value as estimated by the CMB.

Large-Scale Asymmetry in the Distribution of Galaxy Spin Directions—Analysis and Reproduction

“…As the table shows, galaxies spinning counterclockwise in the part of the sky around the northern galactic pole are brighter than galaxies spinning counterclockwise in the same part of the sky. These results are aligned with the results of similar experiments with other telescopes [178], and explain the higher number of counterclockwise galaxies observed in that part of the sky. In this case, the asymmetry in the number of galaxies can be attributed to galaxy rotation and internal structure of galaxies, rather than to the large-scale structure of the Universe.…”

“…Comparison of the brightness of these galaxies shows a statistically significant difference in the brightness of clockwise and counterclockwise galaxies. This was also shown with galaxies from SDSS, Pan-STARRS, HST, and DESI Legacy Survey [177,178]. The difference in galaxy brightness can be linked directly to the asymmetry in the number of galaxies that spin in opposite directions.…”

“…It might be in agreement with other theories such as ellipsoidal universe [50,52], rotating Universe [55][56][57], and black hole cosmology [75][76][77][78][79]81,82,[172][173][174][175][176], which assume the existence of a cosmological-scale axis, but it is not aligned with the standard model. On the other hand, it is also possible that the Universe does not have a cosmological-scale axis, and the observed asymmetry is driven by internal structure of galaxies [177,178]. In that case, the observation can be explained without the need to modify the standard cosmological model.…”

A Simple Direct Empirical Observation of Systematic Bias of the Redshift as a Distance Indicator

“…If the rotational velocity of Ia supernovae and their host galaxies relative to the Milky Way affect their estimated distance, when the rotational velocity relative to the Milky Way is normalized, the H 0 tension is expected to be resolved. As demonstrated in [74], when limiting the SH0ES collection [122] of Ia supernovae to galaxies that rotate in the same direction as the Milky Way, the computed H 0 drops to ∼69.05 km/s Mpc −1 , which is closer to the H 0 determined by the CMB and within statistical error from it. When using just galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way, the H 0 does not drop but instead increases to ∼74.2 km/s Mpc −1 to further increase the H 0 tension [74].…”

“…These results are also consistent with the results shown in Section 3. The ∆z is lower than the ∆z observed with the dataset used in Section 3, and that could be due to the certain error rate of the annotations made by the SpArcFiRe algorithm, which is expected to weaken the signal as also shown quantitatively in Section 7.1 in [74]. To test for the effect of the annotation error, the dataset described in Section 2 was used such that 15% of the galaxies were assigned intentionally with the wrong spin direction.…”