Quote:
Originally Posted by xelasnave
Carl I recall reading that a study showed the galaxies studied did in fact line up like buttons on a string.
I have tried to find the article but no luck..had it on my old lappy but it is no more..The article was in science daily or something similar and seemed most reasonable and not a crackpot guess..
I raised it some time ago here but no one thought it curious at all .... I am not bringing it up to support EU but I think there is support for the line up thing ...there was an article and artists impressions so I doubt it was not "scientific"  . But if the line up is as I recall and from valid observation I felt you may care to know about it I am sorry I cant provide a link.
When I read about it I was set to wondering why and asked same in a post ..
All I wonder is have you heard of such a study?
alex  |
Apart from the overall general arrangement of the galaxy clusters and superclusters into large filamentary structures, there is no evidence at all that individual galaxies are, in fact, lined up like "buttons on a string" . At least not in the way the EU propose.
What evidence that there are some galaxies that have been found to have some sort of orientation (quote from "Fossil Evidence for Spin Alignment of SDSS Galaxies in Filaments" dated Sept 17 2010...very new paper)
Quote:
We search for and find fossil evidence that the spin axes of galaxies in cosmic web filaments relative to their host filaments are not randomly distributed. This indicates the fact that the action of large-scale tidal torques affected the alignments of galaxies located in cosmic filaments.
To this end, we constructed a catalogue of clean filaments containing edge-on galaxies. We started by applying the multiscale morphology filter technique to the galaxies in a redshift-distortion-corrected version of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5. From this sample, we extracted 426 filaments that contained edge-on galaxies (b/a < 0.2). These filaments were then visually classified relative to a variety of quality criteria. These selected filaments contained 69 edge-on galaxies. Statistical analysis using ‘feature measures’ indicates that the distribution of orientations of these edge-on galaxies relative to their parent filament deviates significantly from what would be expected on the basis of a random distribution of orientations. Fewer than 1 per cent of orientation histograms generated from simulated random distributions show the same features as observed in the data histogram.
The interpretation of this result may not be immediately apparent, but it is easy to identify a population of 14 objects whose spin axes are aligned perpendicular to the spine of the parent filament (cos θ < 0.2). The candidate objects are found in relatively less dense filaments. This happens because galaxies in such locations suffer less interaction with surrounding galaxies and consequently better preserve their tidally induced orientations relative to the parent filament. These objects are also less intrinsically bright and smaller than their counterparts elsewhere in the filaments.
The technique of searching for fossil evidence of alignment yields relatively few candidate objects, but it does not suffer from the dilution effects inherent in correlation analysis of large samples. The candidate objects could be the subjects of a programme of observations aimed at understanding in what way they might differ from their non-aligned counterparts.
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You'll see that the few galaxies they did find with any possible orientation were oriented
perpendicular to the long axis of the filaments, which if it was the case as proposed by the EU would be an alignment parallel to the long axis if the filament. The spin axes of the galaxies would follow the direction of the current. Why?? Simple EM theory...the magnetic field of the galaxy has to be perpendicular to the direction of the flow of the current. In this case, with the spiral arms etc, being a product of Birkeland currents within the galaxies, the combined fields of both the filament current and the Birkeland currents (within the galaxies themselves) would forcibly align the rotational axes of the galaxies to the direction of the current.
There is no observational evidence for this. This is hardly "beads on a string" type of orientation.
The reason why the galaxies in this study are aligned perpendicular to the current is that they occur in less dense regions of the filament where interactions between galaxies is less common, so any tidally induced orientation of the galaxies, due to the mass of the filament they formed in, is better preserved. They are also smaller galaxies than the others, so they are more affected by tidally induced orientation. Go anywhere else in the filament and the orientation of the galaxies is messy and all over the place.
In any case, there hasn't been enough time for further study of this particular paper, so we will have to wait to see what responses there are to their assertions.