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To: Pete from Shawnee Mission
"... do galaxies generally turn clockwise? Or counterclockwise? "

Let's do a thought experiment.

Imagine that you are looking at a galaxy 1 million light years away from earth and that it appears to be rotating clockwise.

Now imagine that there is an observer on a habitable planet in the same direction as that galaxy and 2 million light years away from earth.

From that distant observers vantage point, in which direction will the galaxy be rotating?

15 posted on 07/22/2022 9:23:32 PM PDT by William Tell
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To: William Tell; Pete from Shawnee Mission
"From that distant observers vantage point, in which direction will the galaxy be rotating?

On earth, water rotates in the same direction in the northern and in the southern hemisphere. It's just that on the opposite hemisphere, you're looking at it from the other side. It does that, though, because gravity and the spherical surface of the earth constrain the water to move on the surface, subjecting it to the Coriolis force. As it moves toward the equator, it must move faster in order to stay on the sphere. It is this sideways acceleration that causes it to spin.

In the universe, there is no spherical surface and even no known center. Therefore, I would expect no uniform spin. I would expect no consistent spin direction of galaxies. It would still look like it's spinning the opposite direction when you look at it from the other side, but you would see galaxies spinning in both directions regardless of where you looked from. On earth, water spins consistently everywhere you look at it in one hemisphere.

17 posted on 07/23/2022 4:14:22 AM PDT by norwaypinesavage (Capitalism is what happens when you leave people alone.)
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