They have encountered an interesting algorithmic problem here, very cool.<p><pre><code> To determine whether the universe as a whole has a preferred handedness, they had to repeat the analysis for all tetrahedra constructed from their database of 1 million galaxies. There are nearly 1 trillion trillion such tetrahedra — an intractable list to handle one at a time. But a factoring trick developed in earlier work on a different problem allowed the researchers to look at the parity of tetrahedra more holistically: Rather than assembling one tetrahedron at a time and determining its parity, they could take each galaxy in turn and group all other galaxies according to their distances from that galaxy, creating layers like the layers of an onion.
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The linked earlier work: <a href="https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/454/4/4142/993302" rel="nofollow">https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/454/4/4142/993302</a>
I don't understand why do they need this complicated algorithm. If there is such a blatant bias then it can be detected by sampling a few million random tetrahedra; and that can be done instantaneously.<p>Also, why don't they publish the list of positions of all these galaxies? (Or I couldn't find it easily on either of the original articles [0,1]). If there's just a million of them, this is around the same size as a single high-resolution color image. Then people can download the positions and find the asymmetries themselves!<p>[0] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.04227" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.04227</a><p>[1] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03625" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03625</a><p>EDIT: actually, the data is public and easily available! Here is a notebook for playing with it: <a href="https://nbodykit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cookbook/boss-dr12-data.html" rel="nofollow">https://nbodykit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cookbook/boss-dr12...</a>
Could that arise from any early parity symmetry breaking of the weak force?<p>If anyone is interested in parity symmetry or CPT symmetry in general, I can't recommend this book enough: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambidextrous_Universe" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambidextrous_Universe</a> and in particular the part about the Ozma Problem: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambidextrous_Universe#The_Ozma_Problem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambidextrous_Universe#The_...</a><p>Fascinating stuff.
I believe that this is the research being described in the article: <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03625" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03625</a>
I hear topics of analysis of distribution of galaxies from time to time and always wonder how we can actually measure this distribution in any sensible way? What I mean is: Information reaches us at max the speed of light. Information about galaxies from millions of light years afar contribute to the distribution model. Thus the model incorporates spatial distributions of objects (=galaxies) which are certainly no longer true as of now.<p>Put differently: When we assume the big bang and assume further as a thought experiment that mass expands equally, the model would requires to account for information from early objects, where mass distribution was different. Otherwise the conclusion would be drawn that mass is unevenly distributed.
Oddly no mention of two-point correlation, another anomaly suggesting quantum effects at the birth of the universe gave it its large-scale structure.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_function_(astronomy)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_function_(astronom...</a>
Can someone give me a lycée dropout level explanation what they are writing here?<p>I am gathering that galaxies are spaced in tetrahedral formation, and some fashion there are "mirrors" i.e, tetrahedral formation but with opposite side-lengths, but now discovered that is not so?<p>I am confuserated.
<i>from a catalog of 1 million galaxies</i><p>For a lay person, reading that number is mind blowing. Quick question: how many do we think there are? Or rather, do we have some sort of a number for the total energy there is in the universe compared to that of our sun?
The question might be, if you ran the experiment again, would you get the same bias, or a different one? (as in, go back to the gnab gib and .. do over)
Large-scale anisometry can also be viewed as more evidence towards invalidating of the big bang model.<p>Acknowledging the usual pragmas of "all models are wrong" and science needs something to proceed by, I also find it useful the idea of keeping a tally of how many free parameters need to be added to our cosmology as a measure of its (increasingly poor) fit.
> “If this result is real, someone’s going to get a Nobel Prize,”<p>I hope it is real, the result sounds legitimately very exciting. Hopefully they manage to measure the same parity violation in the CMBR.
Given the Gosmic Microwave Background Radiation, and things like this study, there were clearly some "parameters" in effect at the strart of the universe.<p>I'll stop there, call that whatever you want.<p>But whatever those parameters were, allowed me to type this comment on Hacker News.