Evidence for a Preferred Handedness of Spiral Galaxies

Abstract

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.

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

References in corpus (1)

• The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Searching for a Cosmological Preferred Axis: Union2 Data Analysis and Comparison with Other Probes
• Reconstructing the cosmic density field with the distribution of dark matter halos
• Galaxy Zoo: Morphological Classification and Citizen Science
• Spinning Toroidal Brane Cosmology; A Classical and Quantum Survey