138 research outputs found
Handedness asymmetry of spiral galaxies with z<0.3 shows cosmic parity violation and a dipole axis
A dataset of 126,501 spiral galaxies taken from Sloan Digital Sky Survey was
used to analyze the large-scale galaxy handedness in different regions of the
local universe. The analysis was automated by using a transformation of the
galaxy images to their radial intensity plots, which allows automatic analysis
of the galaxy spin and can therefore be used to analyze a large galaxy dataset.
The results show that the local universe (z<0.3) is not isotropic in terms of
galaxy spin, with probability P<5.8*10^-6 of such asymmetry to occur by chance.
The handedness asymmetries exhibit an approximate cosine dependence, and the
most likely dipole axis was found at RA=132, DEC=32 with 1 sigma error range of
107 to 179 degrees for the RA. The probability of such axis to occur by chance
is P<1.95*10^-5 . The amplitude of the handedness asymmetry reported in this
paper is generally in agreement with Longo, but the statistical significance is
improved by a factor of 40, and the direction of the axis disagrees somewhat.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in Physics Letters
- …