How did the Universe come by its angular momentum?

01 April 2012

PERSON UNIVERSE

Person's silhouette in front of star-scape

Share

Question

Hi

Thanks for the show, I find it totally fascinating.

It seems the universe is full of angular momentum. Planets revolve and orbit stars, stars revolve and orbit galactic centres even sub atomic particles spin. Yet the origin of the universe was the big bang where everything exploded outward froma point source. As I understand it there is a law of conservation of angular momentum saying it cannot be created or destroyed onlt transferred. So I am puzzled where did all the angular momentum come from? Regards
Freddie Alderson
Lagos
Portugal

Answer

You don't actually have to have any overall rotation in the whole universe for objects within the universe to be rotating in various different directions.

Imagine that you have a large cloud of gas that has no rotation to begin with, but that you split it up into lots of little pieces which go on to form into lots of different galaxies. Each piece by random chance will have some particles which are swirling around in some particular direction, and others which are swirling around in other directions, so it will have some very tiny rotation in some particular direction. Now as that cloud collapses down to form a star or a galaxy, there's an effect called the conservation of angular momentum which means that spin is accelerated as the object gets smaller.

That's similar to the effect when a figure skater is skating on ice and they start off spinning quite slowly, when they pull their arms in you'll see they start spinning incredibly quickly. So, that means that an object, even if it only has a tiny rotation to begin with, can actually end up rotating quite appreciably as we see planets and stars in the universe doing. Certainly, if you look at the rotations of different stars, you will see that smaller stars tend to rotate much more quickly than bigger stars and that is because they're being spun up as they've contracted down.

Comments

The answer doesn't address the question though. How would stuff just start rotating on its own randomly? Why did anything start to coalesce at all? The big bang is theorized not as an explosion so to speak but a sudden expansion of a singularity. What caused the initial conditions to be thrown out of balance to trigger non-uniform density of the plasma to allow things to coalesce into individual galaxies at all and what imbalance triggered the spin? Stuff doesn't just go from expanding outward in every direction with no rotational energy to everything have some form of spin that we see today without something instigating it.

I understand your point, but you have to think in terms of billions upon billions of particles all colliding and rebounding randomly. You can put spin on a snooker ball if you strike it at the right angle. The same applies here. And when, again through random fluctuations, some things find themselves close together, gravity may dominate and cause them to coalesce.

The most correct and obvious answer to the question of “Where did Universe come from?” is that it, being finite, has eternal Primal cause, which is non-material by its nature and not bound by laws of nature as matter is. It is simple and elementary.

No,by giving a made up answer you're just postponing the inevitable "i don't know" by merely one more step: what exactly is nature of this cause and how exactly is the process of UNIVERSE CREATION?

the most correct answer is : We don't really know, at least yet, and probably will never fully understand. Although we do have some theories that are backed up by data, observable facts that is.

Whereas saying things like "non-material" and "not bound by laws of nature" is basically the equivalent of saying: We don't know how to explain this by any rational means, so we will make up a nonsensical explanation, while professing it to be nonsensical, so that it cannot be rejected by logic because it is by definition: beyond logic. it doesn't have to make sense. I mean scientific sense & logic.
But why bother then at all? If you abandon the realm of nature in your search for answers, any answer is equally possible and equally unsatisfying, it's not an explanation at all, it is a fairy-tale.

It would seem quite likely that if all the rotational energy was added up it could well all cancel out.
However this does not explain how in a system such as the universe just after the big bang something in one place acquires rotational energy of one sort that could be cancelled out by rotation energy of the opposite sort created somewhere else.

john f

Add a comment