Return to the Lopsided Universe

Back in early December I wrote about the Galaxy Zoo project, in which millions of regular folks (including me) help astronomers classify the shapes of galaxies. Our effort yielded the profoundly surprising result that, as seen from our nothing-special galaxy in a nowhere-special corner of the cosmos, the universe seems to have more galaxies that spiral counter-clockwise than clockwise. By all rights, they should be 50-50; any other ratio is insanely inexplicable. At the time, I guessed it probably said less about the universe than those observing it. Maybe, when faced with a faint fuzzy image and asked to detect a structure, more people somehow perceive a counter-clockwise one. That would be weird, but a lot less weird than a crooked cosmos.

Turns out I got it about right. To figure out what was going on, the Galaxy Zoo people did something very simple and clever: they flopped a bunch of their galaxy photos into mirror images of themselves, shuffled them back into the deck, and let us classify them again. And we beefwitted classifiers still thought we were seeing more counter-clockwise spirals than clockwise, and in about the same proportion (52-48). This post explains the statistics in numbing detail, but the essense is that if there's something screwy in the human-universe interaction, it ain't the universe's fault.

Galaxy Zoo can't explain why the observational bias exists, just that it does. Still sounds like a pretty interesting question for some psychologist or neurologist to look into. But not an astronomer.
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