Do galaxies have preferred handedness?

New Scientist tells that spiral galaxies which seem to have tendency to be left handed along two lines which have angle of 85 degrees with respect to each other. Galaxies would be therefore like biomolecules which also have preferred handedness in living matter.

Handedness in geometric sense requires that the mirror image of the galaxy is not identical with galaxy itself. In good approximation galaxies are however rotationally symmetric around the spin axis. In dynamical sense handedness results if the total angular momentum of galaxy is non-vanishing. Spiral galaxies indeed have spin.

What has been observed that along these two lines of sight there are more left- than right handed galaxies. The length for the light of sight was 1.2 billion ly in the survey of Michael Longo and 3.4 billion ly in the survey of Lior Shamir. The scale of our large void is about .1 billion light years so that cosmic length scales are in question. The findings could of course be statistical flukes. Future surveys will resolve this issue.

The existence of a preferred axes of symmetry in cosmic scales does not fit well with isotropy and homogenuity assumptions of the standard cosmology. The TGD based proposal for the formation of galaxies and other astrophysical structures relies on a fractal network of string like objects defined by Kähler magnetic flux tubes. These magnetic flux tubes were present in primordial cosmology and had 1-D M⁴ projection at that time: they indeed defined string world sheets in M⁴. During the cosmic expansion the thickness of their M⁴ projections has increased gradually. These string like objects carry dark energy as magnetic energy and also the magnetic fields have become weaker during expansion. These flux tubes could also correspond to a gigantic value of Planck constant. Various astrophysical structures consisting of ordinary and dark matter would have formed via the decay of the magnetic energy of the flux tubes to ordinary and dark particles. The basic difference with respect to the inflationary scenario is that the energy of inflaton field is replaced with Kähler magnetic field and identified as dark energy.

Galaxies would be like pearls in a necklace. The dark matter and energy along the galactic necklaces causes a logarithmic 2-D gravitational potential producing constant velocity spectrum for distant stars. The basic prediction is that the galaxies can move freely along the flux tubes: this could explain the observed systematic motions in cosmic scale also challenging the basic assumptions of standard cosmology. Galaxies moving along different flux tubes can also collide if the flux tubes go near each other: this could be caused by their gravitational attraction already during the primordial period. One can imagine a cosmic highway network consisting of flux tubes intersecting at nodes and formed during the primordial period. Galaxies not obeying cosmic traffic rules could collide at crossings;-).

Since the necklace would have been much shorter during the primordial period, the proto galaxies possibly existing already at that time would have very near to each other and dynamically strongly coupled. Therefore the correlation of the directions of the angular momenta of proto galaxies - roughly in the direction of the long string like flux tube - could be a remnant from this time. This remnant manifesting itself as a definite handedness would be stabilized by the conservation of angular momentum after the decoupling of the galaxies from each other. The large value of Planck constant could also make possible quantum coherence in astrophysical scales for dark matter and energy and in this manner explain the correlations.

That there are two axes of this kind would suggest that our galaxy resides at junction of cosmic highways as a victim of cosmic traffic accident: that is in the node at which to cosmic necklaces touch. This is what I suggested in the earlier posting inspired by one particular finding challenging the assumption that galactic dark matter forms a spherical halo.

The finding was that near galactic center there is a distribution of satellite galaxies and star clusters, which rotate around Milky Way in a plane orthogonal to the plane of Milky Way. The observation could be interpreted by assuming that two orthogonal magnetic flux tubes (90 degrees is not far form 85 degrees) containing galaxies along them intersect at our galaxy. The newly found distribution of matter would correspond to a matter rotating around the flux tube - call it B - in the same way as the matter of our own galaxy rotates around the second flux tube - call it A. These flux tubes could correspond to the lines of sight found in the two surveys.