Spin-tingling possibilities (Image: NASA/ESA/Aura-ESA/R. Chandar/J. Miller)
IT IS the kind of mystery that could keep a cosmologist up at night: the discovery of a non-random pattern in the structure of the universe. Now fresh evidence for an “axis of asymmetry”, along which many more spiral galaxies seem to spin one way than the other, threatens to undermine our understanding of the cosmos.
The first hint of such an axis emerged last year in a survey of about 15,000 spiral galaxies, which have a spin that is either left or right-handed (Â鶹´«Ã½, 17 October 2011, p 44).
The…
