Planets, stars, galaxies, clusters, everything in the universe is spinning/rotating. Why?
In: Physics
One way to think about it is that it would be weirder if it wasn’t rotating. try and make an explosion that goes perfectly out in straight lines from each other at uniform speed. That’s pretty hard to do, any slight imperfection in the exploding object is going to introduce some kind of angular momentum and spin.
Then there’s conservation of angular momentum, which is interesting, because we know this is conserved, but when we look out of the universe it appears that at some point it wasn’t conserved, basically the universe appears to prefer to spin one way and not the other ( on a galactic scale), which is interesting innit, but take this bit with a pinch of salt cause I cant really remember the details it was a long time ago.
edit: If you want to illustrate the spin to yourself. put your index fingers on the table and move them forward – these are your bits of the explosion, move one slightly further, cause it was slightly faster by accident. now add gravity and move them towards each other, if these two points are the edges of your galaxy you can kind of see the spin being introduced.
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