Is There Evidence for Handedness in the Universe?

[wolram]

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0703325

Authors: Michael J. Longo
Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures. Link to supporting material has been corrected. [ this http URL ]

In this article I study the distribution of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to investigate whether the universe has an overall handedness. A preference for spiral galaxies in one sector of the sky to be left-handed or right-handed spirals would indicate an asymmetry in the overall universe and a preferred axis. The SDSS data show a strong signal for such an asymmetry. Its axis seems to be strongly correlated with that of the quadrupole and octopole moments in the WMAP microwave sky survey, an unlikely alignment that has been dubbed "the axis of Evil".

 

[wolram]

http://www.citebase.org/abstract?id=oai:arXiv.org:astro-ph/0507289

Authors: Land, Kate; Magueijo, Joao
We investigate the point-parity and mirror-parity handedness of the large angle anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In particular we consider whether the observed low CMB quadrupole could more generally signal odd point-parity, i.e. suppression of even multipoles. Even though this feature is ``visually'' present in most renditions of the WMAP dataset we find that it never supports parity preference beyond the meagre 95% confidence level. This is fortunate as point parity handedness implies almost certainly a high level of galactic contamination. Mirror reflection parity, on the contrary, is related to the emergence of a preferred axis, defining the symmetry plane. We use this technique to make contact with recent claims for an anisotropic Universe, showing that the detected preferred axis is associated with positive (even) mirror parity. This feature may be an important clue in identifying the culprit for this unexpected signal.
Comment: Submitted to Physical Review D

Phys.Rev. D72 (2005) 101302