the filaments of the cosmic web spin!

[notFritzArgelander]

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-largest-u ... ation.html

There are ancient threads here(?) and lost in the old sod about the correlation of galaxy orientations within filaments. That is then likely related to this observation.

[notFritzArgelander]

I have a thing about spin and rotations so I hope you'll find some additional material on this (to me) fascinating result.

The key pin to terrestrial physics is that the sense of this is that the filaments of the cosmic web can be interpreted as vortex lines.

Here is what a vortex line is....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex

Likely the filaments are irrotational vortex lines. (Note there is no contradiction between spinning and being an irrotational vortex. See the diagram on irrotational vortices for details.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex

Here's a neat video from PhysicsGirl on vortices. https://fyfluiddynamics.com/2014/12/vor ... ctures-in/

So cool!

[turboscrew]

One always learns something new here!

[GCoyote]

One always learns something new here!

Indeed.

[Graeme1858]

I heard about this in a podcast (Awesome Astronomy) this morning whilst driving to work. Fascinating indeed!

The wow for me is that the filaments are so huge that even though they spin at over 100 km per second they still have not rotated once during the whole age of the universe (our 13.8 bn bit!) Wow!

Here's a New Scientist piece:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... -spinning/

Regards

Graeme