http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04424
While it is clear that spiral galaxies can have different handedness, galaxies with clockwise patterns are assumed to be symmetric in all of their other characteristics to galaxies with counterclockwise patterns. Here we use data from SDSS DR7 to show that photometric data can distinguish between clockwise and counterclockwise galaxies. Pattern recognition algorithms trained and tested using the photometric data of a clean dataset of 13,440 spiral galaxies with z<0.25 can predict the handedness of a spiral galaxy in ~64.43% of the cases, significantly higher than mere chance accuracy of 50% (P<10^-48). That shows that the photometric data collected by SDSS is sensitive to the handedness of the galaxy. Analysis of individual photometric variables showed that the SDSS `Stokes U’ parameter measured in several different bands exhibited a Bonferroni-corrected statistically significant difference between clockwise and counterclockwise spiral galaxies. Other differences were observed in the magnitude model fitting likelihoods. These findings suggest the possibility of asymmetry between galaxies with clockwise patterns and galaxies that have counterclockwise patterns. The distribution of the handedness shows a higher population of galaxies with clockwise patterns in z>0.02. Code and data used in the experiment are publicly available, and the experiment can be easily replicated.
L. Shamir
Tue, 19 Jan 16
20/67
Comments: Submitted on December 27, 2015. URLs to the data and instructions for replicating the experiments are available in the appendix
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