To discover the universe’s handedness, Slepian’s lab imagined all the possible combinations of four galaxies connected by imaginary lines in space. Parity violation would mean that the universe does have a preference for either left- or right-handed shapes. There is no way to rotate your left hand in three dimensions to make it look like your right hand, which means they are always distinguishable from one another. Scientists usually use the language of “handedness” to describe this trait, because our left and right hands are mirror images we are all familiar with.

Parity symmetry is the idea that physical laws shouldn’t prefer one shape over its mirror image.

The same researchers first proposed the idea of searching for parity violation using quadruplets of galaxies in a paper that was also recently published in Physical Review Letters. The trio published their findings May 22 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Slepian worked with UF postdoctoral researcher and the study’s first author, Jiamin Hou, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicist Robert Cahn to conduct the analysis. “This work addresses those big questions.” What is the beginning of the universe? What are the rules under which it evolves? Why is there something rather than nothing?” said Zachary Slepian, a UF astronomy professor who supervised the new study. “I’ve always been interested in big questions about the universe. Parity violation would also help answer perhaps the most crucial question in cosmology: Why is there something instead of nothing? That’s because parity violation is required to explain why there is more matter than antimatter, an essential condition for galaxies, stars, planets and life to form in the way they have. First, this parity violation could only have imprinted itself on the future galaxies during a period of extreme inflation in the earliest moments of the universe, confirming a central component of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the cosmos. The finding, established with a high level of statistical confidence, has two primary consequences. This idea, known as parity symmetry violation, points to an infinitesimal period in our universe’s history when the laws of physics were different than they are today, with enormous consequences for how the universe evolved. The UF scientists studied a whopping million trillion three-dimensional galactic quadruplets in the universe and discovered that the universe at one point preferred one set of shapes over their mirror images. Yet in a new paper, University of Florida astronomers have found the first evidence of this necessary violation of symmetry at the moment of creation. Indeed, since the 1960s, some kind of broken symmetry has been required to explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe – why, that is, that any of this exists at all.īut pinning down the source behind this existential symmetry violation, even finding proof of it, has been impossible. Symmetry is a tidy and attractive idea that falls apart in our untidy universe. For generations, physicists were sure the laws of physics were perfectly symmetric.

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