From Dr. Becky.
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Does the Universe spin? Think about it, planets spin, the Sun spins, galaxies spin, even black holes spin – so what about the entire Universe? And if it was spinning could this help solve one of the biggest problems in astrophysics today – the "crisis in cosmology", or what’s known as the Hubble Tension. This is where we have two main ways of measuring the expansion rate of the Universe and they do not agree. Now the idea of the Universe possibly spinning is not a new idea, it’s been around for a long time, with scientists like Newton, Mach, and Einstein all thinking about it as a possibility, but we’ve never found any observational evidence to back up the idea that the universe spins. But this month this paper by Szigeti and collaborators has revisited this idea and claimed it could solve the Hubble Tension. But just because it can solve it, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the correct way to solve it. So can we prove that the Universe is actually spinning?
Szigeti et al. (2025) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13525
Gödel (1949) – https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.21.447
Land et al. (2008) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/0803.3247
Land & Magueijo (2005) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0502237
Venkatraman Krishnan et al. (2020) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.11405
My previous videos on the Crisis in Cosmology – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn
My previous video on the Copernican principle – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-UQxfgFEe4
My previous video on the "axis of evil" – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDRNvhbrz3k
00:00 Introduction
03:17 A quick recap on the crisis in cosmology
06:51 What Szigeti and collaborators have claimed can solve it
12:12 Whether we can prove it?
16:45 Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
