Mysterious James Webb Discovery Could Mean We Live in a Black Hole

A new discovery using the James Webb Telescope has implied we may live in a black hole.

The telescope, launched by NASA three years ago, gives us the ability to take photographs of deep space with unprecedented resolution.

Now new images have shown that around two-thirds of 263 galaxies imaged by Webb rotate in the opposite direction to our Milky Way galaxy.

It had been expected that the number of galaxies rotating clockwise and counterclockwise would be roughly the same.

While the reason for this imbalance is presently unclear, one hypothesis that might explain it is that our entire universe lies inside a black hole.

"One explanation is that the universe was born rotating," paper author and computer scientist Lior Shamir of Kansas State University said in a statement.

"That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole.

"But if the universe was indeed born rotating it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete."

He told Newsweek: "In fact, the Black Hole Cosmology is just one explanation to the observation. If what we see through JWST is indeed what the early Universe looks like, it might mean that the Universe was indeed born rotating."

Adding that the contention that the universe is the interior of a black hole was first proposed in the 1970s, he said it was "initially inspired by the good match between the radius of the Universe and the radius of a black hole—the Schwarzschild radius. It also explains the accelerated expansion of the Universe without the need to assume dark energy."

"But another option is that what we see is not the real early Universe, but just the early universe as we see it from Earth," he told Newsweek.

"That is because the motion of the Earth within the Milky Way galaxy leads to small changes in the brightness of the galaxies that we observe. Galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way are slightly brighter than galaxies that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way. Because they are brighter, we see more of them. That can help explain some of the biggest unsolved questions in cosmology. Distances at cosmological scale depend on the analysis of light.

"If the light is affected by the motion of the Earth, it means that the distances are slightly biased. That can explain why we see mature galaxies that are expected to be older than the Universe itself, and why the expansion rate of the Universe when we measure it with galaxies is not the same as expected."

The clockwise bias in the rotation of the galaxies studied is striking, Shamir said in a statement.

"The analysis of the galaxies was done by quantitative analysis of their shapes, but the difference is so obvious that any person looking at the image can see it," he added.

"There is no need for special skills or knowledge to see that the numbers are different. With the power of the James Webb Space Telescope, anyone can see it."

Another explanation for the finding could be that galaxies rotating clockwise are overrepresented because of the Doppler shift effect, which makes them brighter.

Should that be the case, researchers would need to "re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," Shamir said.

"The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself."

The Webb telescope studies every phase in the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the formation of solar systems, and the evolution of our own solar system, according to NASA.

It orbits the sun, 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth.

Shamir told Newsweek that he is now working on "profiling the link between the rotational velocity, distance, and light. That means comparing the effect at different distances from Earth.

"If the effect of the rotational velocity of the Milky Way increases as the distance grows, it could provide an indication that our distance measurements are biased and require re-calibration," which can "answer many open questions in cosmology that currently cannot be answered."

Update 3/17/25, 11:10 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to include comment from Lior Shamir.

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Reference

Shamir, L. (2025). The distribution of galaxy rotation in JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 538(1), 76–91. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf292