Yowza

This article came up on the preprint server just yesterday: http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.4013


I have studied a sample of 200,000 elliptical galaxies with redshifts below 0.20 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to investigate whether they tend to have their ellipticities aligned along a particular axis. The data show a 13 standard deviation signal for such an alignment. The axis is close to the spiral spin axis found previously and to that of the quadrupole and octopole moments in the WMAP microwave sky survey.

This is actually really exciting because it is the first solid evidence of an anisotropy in the galaxies which could potentially point to cosmic-scale asymmetries acting in the birth of our universe. The paper boils down to the existence of an axis running through the universe along which observed elliptical galaxies seem to be oriented. This sounds a lot like the orientation of dipoles in a ferromagnet, a good example being the alignment of atoms' dipole moments in a bar magnet: The atoms left to their own devices would usually prefer to be aligned randomly, as it usually costs more energy to align with the atom next to you than to align opposite. One thing that can cause a large scale alignment is the presence of a strong magnetic field, especially when temperatures are high. In the birth of the universe, temperatures were definitely high (in the range of 10^6-10^12 Kelvin during formative processes) and so a large magnetic anisotropy might cause an alignment like this in the formation of the galaxies. I don't understand very well where a magnetic field like this could originate and at what point in time it would be effective in causing an elliptical galaxy to align with it, but the possibility of such a large magnetic field is the interesting part: From what would such a phenomenon originate?