Evidence for a Preferred Handedness of Spiral Galaxies
  In this article I extend an earlier study of spiral galaxies in the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to investigate whether the universe has an overall
handedness. A preference for spiral galaxies in one sector of the sky to be
left-handed or right-handed spirals would indicate a parity-violating asymmetry
in the overall universe and a preferred axis. The previous study used 2616
spiral galaxies with redshifts <0.04 and identified handedness. The new study
uses 15158 with redshifts <0.085 and obtains very similar results to the first
with a signal exceeding 5 sigma, corresponding to a probability ~2.5x10-7 for
occurring by chance. A similar asymmetry is seen in the Southern Galaxy spin
catalog of Iye and Sugai. The axis of the dipole asymmetry lies at approx. (l,
b) =(52 d, 68.5 d), roughly along that of our Galaxy and close to alignments
observed in the WMAP cosmic microwave background distributions.
