Physicists theorize: SPACE ISN'T SAME IN ALL DIRECTIONS
(AP) -- Like the grain of wood, space itself may have an inherent quality that makes it behave differently depending on which way it's cut.
That's the contention of two physicists anyway, whose study of distant galaxies has led them to violate a physics taboo by proposing that there's a difference in the universe's properties depending on which direction you're looking.
"Everything we say and do is based on the assumption that there isn't," said Robert Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University.
Nevertheless, John Ralston of the University of Kansas and Borge Nodland of the University of Rochester are confident in their analysis. They collected 160 observations of distant galaxies made with radio telescopes. And when they put all of them together, they found a pattern that nobody had ever seen before.
The radio signals coming from one direction -- the constellation Sextans -- appear ever so slightly different from the ones originating 90 degrees away in the sky. The polarization, or direction of oscillation, of the radio waves differed systematically depending on where the physicists looked.
"That indicates that not all directions are equal," Nodland said.
AGAINST ALL ODDS
The universe has an axis, he and Ralston suggest in a paper to be published Monday in the journal Physical Review Letters, giving it an ordered structure that extends billions of light-years across space.
That may not sound too revolutionary to the average person, accustomed to concepts such as up and down, left and right, north and south. But to physicists, the idea of directional orientation in the universe is a mind blower.
"If this were true it would be important," Kirshner said. "It would mean that somehow the magnetic field in the universe wasn't the same in all directions."
Several possible reasons emerge for why the universe might have a preferred direction, said Nodland, all of them profound.
"It could indicate that maybe the origin of the universe was not as perfect as we thought," Nodland said.
That is, the big bang could have bulged out more in one direction than in others. Then again, it could be that hypothetical particles known as axions are affecting the radio waves. But nobody's ever seen physical evidence for an axion, so that one's a little sketchy.
And then there are the really wild explanations. The radio waves could be traversing things called "domain walls" that separate parts of the universe having different fundamental properties. Or maybe physicists have just missed a physical force up until now.
"If it's a real physical effect, there's something awesome there," Ralston said. "We never know, right?" |
