Does the Universe Spin Once Every 500 Billion Years?
Does the Universe spin? Think about it, planets spin, the Sun spins, galaxies spin, even black holes spin - so what about the entire Universe?
2025-05-09 23:00:00 - Dr. Becky
And if it was spinning could this help solve one of the biggest problems in astrophysics today - the "crisis in cosmology", or what’s known as the Hubble Tension.
This is where we have two main ways of measuring the expansion rate of the Universe and they do not agree. Now the idea of the Universe possibly spinning is not a new idea, it’s been around for a long time, with scientists like Newton, Mach, and Einstein all thinking about it as a possibility, but we’ve never found any observational evidence to back up the idea that the universe spins.
But this month this paper by Szigeti and collaborators has revisited this idea and claimed it could solve the Hubble Tension. But just because it can solve it, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the correct way to solve it. So can we prove that the Universe is actually spinning?
00:00 - Introduction
03:17 - A quick recap on the crisis in cosmology
06:51 - What Szigeti and collaborators have claimed can solve it
12:12 - Whether we can prove it?
16:45 - Bloopers