<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: RotationPedant</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RotationPedant</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 08:41:35 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=RotationPedant" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by RotationPedant in "James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rotate Clockwise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That is correct, "clockwise" only makes sense relative to a single observer: on Earth we set up out coordinate system so that the Milky Way's directed axis of rotation points one way, and most galaxies have it pointing the other way. "Clockwise / counterclockwise"  makes sense for images coming from telescopes but it's not cosmologically meaningful.<p>Note that this is not that easy to determine:<p><pre><code>  When done manually, the determination of the direction of rotation of a galaxy can be a subjective task, as different annotators might have different opinions regarding the direction towards a galaxy rotates. A simple example is the crowdsourcing annotation through Galaxy Zoo 1 (Land et al. 2008), where in the vast majority of the galaxies different annotators provided conflicting annotations. Therefore, the annotations shown in Fig. 1 were made by a computer analysis that followed a defined symmetric model (Shamir 2024e).
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The point is that we would typically assume a 50-50 ratio regardless of where you are in the universe.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2025 11:29:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43533719</link><dc:creator>RotationPedant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43533719</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43533719</guid></item></channel></rss>