Everything around us spins.
The Earth spins on its axis. The Moon orbits the Earth. The Sun spins. Galaxies swirl like giant cosmic hurricanes. Even black holes twist spacetime itself. But here’s a question most of us never stop to ask: what if the entire universe is spinning too?
It sounds wild, almost poetic—but this single idea might actually solve one of the biggest and most frustrating mysteries in modern cosmology: the Hubble Tension.
Let’s dive into this cosmic riddle.
The Universe That Refuses to Agree
Our universe, as far as we know, is expanding. Edwin Hubble discovered this in 1929 when he found that galaxies are moving away from us—the farther they are, the faster they go. This discovery completely changed our understanding of reality.
To describe this expansion, Hubble introduced a value called the Hubble Constant (H₀)—the cosmic “speed limit” of expansion. But there’s a problem.
We can measure this constant in two different ways, and both methods give us two very different answers.
The Two Faces of the Hubble Constant
Scientists use:
The Cosmic Distance Ladder – measuring the light from nearby galaxies and exploding stars (supernovae). The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – studying ancient light left over from the Big Bang itself.
If the laws of physics are the same everywhere, both should give the same expansion rate. But they don’t.
The Cosmic Distance Ladder says the universe expands at about 73.8 km/s per megaparsec,
while the CMB method gives 68.2 km/s per megaparsec.
That small 10% gap may not sound like much, but for cosmologists, it’s enormous—far too big to be dismissed as a random error. It’s a genuine contradiction at the heart of cosmology.
This is the Hubble Tension—a cosmic argument that refuses to settle.
What Could Be Causing It?
Some scientists blame dark energy—the mysterious force that makes the universe expand faster. Others point to dark matter, the invisible glue holding galaxies together. But both are still unsolved mysteries themselves.
So maybe, just maybe, the problem lies somewhere else entirely.
And that’s where the bold idea of a spinning universe comes in.
The Cosmic Spin Theory
Earlier this year, researchers published a study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that revisited a decades-old idea first proposed in 1949 by the brilliant logician Kurt Gödel, a close friend of Albert Einstein.
Gödel suggested something astonishing: what if the entire universe rotates?
His math showed that if space itself were spinning, it could naturally explain certain strange observations—like differences in cosmic expansion.
Modern scientists ran the numbers again. And the results? Fascinating.
If the universe rotates once every 500 billion years, that gentle cosmic spin could subtly change how space stretches over time. So small that we can’t directly observe it—but powerful enough to make one measurement of the Hubble Constant look faster than the other.
And here’s the best part: this doesn’t break any laws of physics.
The Evidence That Makes You Think
A recent study found that galaxies don’t spin randomly. More of them rotate in one preferred direction. If the universe were truly still and symmetrical, we’d expect half of them to spin clockwise and half counterclockwise. But that’s not what we see.
This strange imbalance could be a faint fingerprint—a silent whisper—of a universe that’s turning ever so slowly.
A Universe That Moves Like a Living Thing
Imagine it.
A universe not standing still, but dancing—rotating as one giant, cosmic wheel through infinity.
If that’s true, it raises breathtaking questions.
What force could make the entire universe spin? Did this rotation begin at the moment of the Big Bang?
And if the universe turns… could time itself be twisting along with it?
For now, this is still a theory—an extraordinary one. To test it, scientists need ultra-powerful computer simulations that can predict exactly how a spinning universe would look. If those predictions match what telescopes observe, we might be on the edge of rewriting the story of the cosmos itself.
Because maybe, just maybe, the universe isn’t only expanding…
It’s also turning—slowly, silently, endlessly.