Is our Universe inside a Black Hole?

Galaxies observed by the JWST with those rotating one way circled in red, those rotating the other wat circled in blue (Image credit: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2025))

Without a doubt, since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized our view of the early universe, but its new findings could put astronomers in a spin. In fact, it could tell us something profound about the birth of the universe by possibly hinting that everything we see around us is sealed within a black hole.

The $10 billion telescope, which began observing the cosmos in the Summer of 2022, has found that the vast majority of deep space and, thus the early galaxies it has so far observed, are rotating in the same direction. While around two-thirds of galaxies spin clockwise, the other third rotates counter-clockwise.

The observations of 263 galaxies that revealed this strangely coordinated cosmic dance was collected as part of the James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or “JADES.”

“It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations,” team leader Lior Shamir, associate professor of computer science at the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering, said in a statement. “One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. 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.”

Born in a black hole?

Black hole cosmology, also known as “Schwarzschild cosmology,” suggests that our observable universe might be the interior of a black hole itself within a larger parent universe.

The idea was first introduced by theoretical physicist Raj Kumar Pathria and by mathematician I. J. Good. It presents the idea that the “Schwarzchild radius,” better known as the “event horizon,” (the boundary from within which nothing can escape a black hole, not even light) is also the horizon of the visible universe.

This has another implication; each and every black hole in our universe could be the doorway to another “baby universe.” These universes would be unobservable to us because they are also behind an event horizon, a one-way light-trapping point of no return from which light cannot escape, meaning information can never travel from the interior of a black hole to an external observer.

This is a theory that has been championed by Polish theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven.

An illustration shows baby universe's sealed within the event horizons of black holes — An illustration shows baby universe’s sealed within the event horizons of black holes (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

Black holes are born when the core of a massive star collapses. At its heart is matter with a density that far exceeds anything in the known universe.

“The matter instead reaches a state of finite, extremely large density, stops collapsing, undergoes a bounce like a compressed spring, and starts rapidly expanding,” Poplawski explained to Space.com. “Extremely strong gravitational forces near this state cause an intense particle production, increasing the mass inside a black hole by many orders of magnitude and strengthening gravitational repulsion that powers the bounce.”

“It produces a finite period of cosmic inflation, which explains why the universe that we observe today appears at largest scales flat, homogeneous, and isotropic,” Poplawski said.

Would you want to fly through a wormhole? Maybe not, astrophysicist Paul Sutter says his Facebook Watch series Ask a Spaceman. — An illustration of a wormhole leading to a new universe. (Image credit: Ask a Spaceman)

“Accordingly, our own universe could be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe,” Poplawski continued. “The motion of matter through the black hole’s boundary, called an event horizon, can only happen in one direction, providing a past-future asymmetry at the horizon and, thus, everywhere in the baby universe.

“The arrow of time in such a universe would, therefore, be inherited, through torsion, from the parent universe.”

Spiral galaxies as seen by the JWST. The galaxies circled in blue rotate in the opposite direction of the Milky Way, the ones in red rotate the same way as the Milky Way (Image credit: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2025))

He added that black holes form from stars or at the centers of galaxies, and most likely globular clusters, which all rotate. That means black holes also rotate, and the axis of rotation of a black hole would influence a universe created by the black hole, manifesting itself as a preferred axis.

“I think that the simplest explanation of the rotating universe is the universe was born in a rotating black hole. Spacetime torsion provides the most natural mechanism that avoids a singularity in a black hole and instead creates a new, closed universe,” Poplawski continued. “A preferred axis in our universe, inherited by the axis of rotation of its parent black hole, might have influenced the rotation dynamics of galaxies, creating the observed clockwise-counterclockwise asymmetry.

“The discovery by the JWST that galaxies rotate in a preferred direction would support the theory of black holes creating new universes, and I would be extremely excited if these findings are confirmed.

Previously, scientists had considered the speed of our galaxy’s rotation to be too slow to have a non-negligible impact on observations made by the JWST.

“If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” Shamir concluded. “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 team’s research was published this month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

at: community@space.com.

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.