HARV

The entire universe might be trapped spinning inside a black hole. That’s what new data from the James Webb Space Telescope seems to suggest. Researchers examined 263 faraway galaxies and discovered something startling: roughly two out of every three are rotating in the same direction. In a truly random cosmos, you’d expect a perfect 50–50 split between clockwise and counterclockwise. This strong imbalance hints that the universe itself may have been born with a net spin. One of the ideas now getting serious attention is known as black hole cosmology. It suggests that our entire universe is nested inside a rotating black hole that belongs to a larger “parent” universe. According to some theorists, when a giant black hole forms, it doesn’t simply collapse forever into a singularity. Instead, it can “bounce,” triggering a rapid expansion that creates a new universe on the inner side of its event horizon. If the parent black hole was spinning, it could have transferred that angular momentum to everything inside—including all the galaxies we see today. That inherited twist might explain why so many distant galaxies appear to prefer the same rotational direction from our vantage point. The same model could also account for the universe’s ongoing expansion and its remarkable large-scale uniformity. Rather than starting from an infinitely dense singularity, the Big Bang may have been a cosmic rebound—a sudden reversal that flung space, time, and matter outward from the heart of a black hole. Of course, other explanations haven’t been ruled out. Our own Milky Way’s rotation, or subtle observational biases, could be skewing the picture. But if larger surveys confirm this galaxy-spin alignment, it would suggest the universe has a deep, hidden handedness—and that its origin story is far stranger than we ever imagined. ["The distribution of galaxy rotation in JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey." Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2025]