Galactic Spacetime Frame Dragging

One of the very interesting phenomena of gravitational physics relates to how massive rotating objects actually drag space time around with them.  Imagine a ball spinning in a viscous fluid such as thick syrup.  As the ball spins, it drags some of the syrup around with it.  The syrup is like spacetime.  It sounds uncanny, but in reality it is what happens – space and time literally do get dragged around massive objects.  The reality is even weirder than the ball example, because massive objects also cause other weird distortions around them – the way they pull on objects can actually shift the internal structure of objects, distorting them in subtle ways, and cause dilations in space and time.  According to the article, the spacetime dilation caused by our spinning Milky Way galaxy is one million times stronger than that caused by Earth.

What is fascinating is that humans are arriving at a point where they will actually be able to detect gravitational waves caused by distant events.  Certain phenomena, usually involving supermassive objects spinning at extremely high velocities, can create these monster gravitational waves which actually propagate through the universe and can conceivably be measured when they pass by Earth.

Today there is a very interesting story in the news about a researcher who claims to solve a long standing mystery physics – certain types of interactions which can lead to either left- or right-handed outcomes tend to favor one side more than the other.  There has been no known mechanism to explain this.  Probabilistically,  there should be an equal number of left- and right-handed events.

Now a researcher claims that this mystery can be solved by taking into account the gravitational frame dragging of the galaxy.  Because our galaxy is super massive, as it spins it creates an enormous effect which actually influences the properties of subatomic particles.  According to his theory, there is in fact no parity violation at all – the effect of our galaxy’s distorting spacetime on subatomic particles evens out in the end, once this effect is taken into account.

This is one of those stories which seems to slip through the radar but which in fact can be very significant.