Our Universe Was Born From a Black Hole—and Now ‘Baby’ Realities Are Nested Inside of Our Own, Physicist Suggests

5 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Research suggests that our universe may not be truly random because galaxies seem to favor a counterclockwise rotation.To some, this supports a theory called black hole cosmology, which suggests that our universe is a black hole nested in a larger parent universe. One physicist even believes that black holes we observe could be other realities—and we may be able to enter them under the right circumstances. We’re taught that our universe is the largest thing we can possibly conceive of, ever expanding into something even bigger. But what if our reality is just a small part of something much more vast? It’s a mind-bending proposition, given that it’s difficult to even imagine what’s beyond Earth, but some striking science suggests that we should reconsider the evidence.If our universe were truly random, we could expect half of the galaxies to rotate one way, and the other half in the opposite direction—but that isn’t the case. Two-thirds of observed galaxies spin counterclockwise. To some scientists, this preferred direction supports a theory called black hole cosmology, or the idea that our universe was born inside of a black hole nested in a larger parent universe. Should this be true, it means that baby universes could exist inside of our own, and it could be possible to enter them under the right circumstances.The discovery of the galaxy asymmetry dates back to 2011, when the late physicist Michael J. Longo, PhD, published an interesting paper in Physics Letters B. His research was based on an analysis of 15,158 spiral galaxies imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico. Longo found that spiral galaxies in one sector of the sky appeared to have a preferred direction of rotation, indicating there may be an asymmetry in how galaxies present in the universe. Last year, scientists confirmed the asymmetry in a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Lior Shamir, PhD—a data scientist and professor at Kansas State University—led the 2025 study. He declined requests for comment.Using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope that looks at galaxies formed early in the universe’s history, Shamir’s team found that a third of the 263 galaxies they studied rotate clockwise relative to Earth. As one could probably guess, the other two-thirds rotate counterclockwise, further pointing to the asymmetry Longo wrote about more than a decade ago. Unlike much of cosmology and astrophysics research, the underlying concept here is quite simple. Shamir’s team used a quantitative analysis of galaxy shapes, but he emphasized in a 2025 press release that (with the help of the telescope) this difference is visible to the average person—no scientific qualifications needed.The work was a follow-up to a 2022 study about galaxy rotation, which also found that certain survey regions favor one spin direction over another. Both papers are a drop in a larger body of work seeking to understand how our universe works—but that doesn’t mean there’s any more certainty. Shamir notes in the press release that it’s “still not clear” why this asymmetry occurs, though researchers certainly have their theories.“One explanation is that the universe was born rotating,” he says in the release. “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.”Speaking of how the universe was born, the prevailing theory is that the cosmos came to be from a blisteringly hot, dense singularity in an event called the Big Bang. But according to Nikodem Poplawski, PhD—a distinguished lecturer in physics at the University of New Haven in Connecticut—the “infinite” density may also suggest the theory of our cosmos’s origin story is unfinished, much like Shamir suggested.Poplawski points to another theory that could remedy this: the Einstein-Cartan theory of gravity—an old extension of general relativity, which may support black hole cosmology. Simply put, this theory accounts for spinning at the tiny quantum level, particularly for elementary particles like electrons and quarks, Poplawski explains. A key player here is torsion, which is a possible twist in the geometry of space-time. Poplawski notes that in high-density conditions such as the Big Bang, the torsion could even counter gravity.The most striking possibility here is that the torsion in the Einstein-Cartan (EC) theory of gravity suggests every black hole creates a little universe inside of it, Poplawski suggests, citing his 2021 paper in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics. This means that a black hole visible in our universe then becomes a wormhole (also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge). The bridge “connects this universe to the parent universe in which the black hole exists,” he explains.“According to my own research, every black hole creates a new, closed, growing universe on the other side of its event horizon,” he says.If scientists managed to confirm that the black holes we see are in fact other universes, we may be able to enter them—under the right circumstances. Poplawski explains that small black holes cause “spaghettification,” or stretching that would be impossible to survive. On the other hand, Poplawski argues that a huge black hole is more feasible, because the tidal forces that cause this stretching are minimal. However, there’s still a major snag: “The question would be what kind of universe could we end up in; it would have to be old enough so it would be cold and populated with stars,” Poplawski says.This also doesn’t mean we can jump back and forth between realities. Poplawski notes that the evolution of a baby universe would be invisible to the host universe because of gravity causing time dilation. Likewise, we couldn’t reenter the parent universe from the outside, because matter can only travel in one direction. Therefore, “A baby universe is thus a separate, closed spacetime branch with its own timeline,” he says.Going back to the work of Longo and Shamir, Poplawski adds that both discoveries also suggest that the universe could have been born as a black hole: “All the stars rotate. Therefore, all the black holes rotate. If our universe was born in a rotating black hole, then it would have inherited the black hole's axis of rotation as a preferred axis.”Otherwise, Poplawski says the data (and torsion) could be confirmed with particle physics, by measuring electrons inside a magnetic device called a Penning trap. The goal would be to see the internal structure of an electron at high precision, to about 100,000 times smaller than what is visible today. Poplawski says with technological advancements, this could happen in the relatively near future. 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What Went Wrong?➡ China Just Built a Terrifying New Aircraft Carrier and May Soon Dominate the SeasOctober / November 2023Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring:➡ How Rats Took Over Our Cities—And Why We Can't Stop Them➡ This Language Is on the Verge of Extinction. Can It Be Saved?➡ America's Deadliest Warplane Returns in a New Doomsday Role➡ This Amateur Diving Group Kept Solving Cold Cases. Then Its Own Skeletons Surfaced. ➡ The Scientific Breakthrough That Could Put an End to Gray Hair. Elizabeth Howell (Ph.D., she/her) is one of a few space journalists in Canada. She has written five books, and was Space.com's former staff reporter in spaceflight. As a freelancer, she has written or edited articles about astronomy and space exploration for outlets such as Payload Space, Air&Space Magazine, Sky & Telescope and Salon. Elizabeth holds university degrees in journalism, science and history and also teaches an astronomy course, with Indigenous content, at Canada's Algonquin College. Aside from watching several astronaut missions launching from Florida and Kazakhstan, Elizabeth once lived like an astronaut at the Mars Society's Mars Desert Research Station in Utah.