'This model had just the right amount of detail to capture all of the essential features because it was large enough to behave just like trillions upon trillions of colliding neutral particles, electrons and ions orbiting a star in a magnetic field,' Bellan said in the statement. These terminals generate powerful currents, or jets of material, that shoot into space from both sides of the disk. In turn, the accretion disk acts as a gigantic battery, with a positive terminal near the disk center and a negative terminal at the disk edge.

Meanwhile, the neutral particles lose angular momentum and spiral inward to the center. They found that the interaction between the neutral atoms and a much smaller number of charged particles results in positively charged ions, or cations, spiraling inward and negatively charged particles, or electrons, moving outward toward the edge of the accretion disk. The researchers used computer models to simulate an accretion disk of 1,000 charged particles colliding with 40,000 neutral particles in magnetic and gravitational fields. While charged particles - electrons and ions - are affected by both gravity and magnetic fields, neutral atoms are affected only by gravity.

To better understand angular momentum loss, Bellan studied the trajectories of individual atoms, ions and gas in an accretion disk and, in turn, how particles behave during and after collisions. There's a big cottage industry right now arguing that turbulence accounts for getting rid of angular momentum in accretion disks.' 'People always want to blame turbulence for phenomena they do not understand. 'That concerned me,' Paul Bellan, a professor of applied physics at Caltech and co-author of the study, said in the statement. The researchers detailed their findings (opens in new tab) online June 14 in the journal Nature Astronomy.So why is the angular momentum of the inner accretion disk not conserved? Earlier research suggested that friction between regions of the accretion disk or magnetic fields generating turbulence (and creating friction) may slow down the rotational speed of infalling gas, according to the statement. The scientists now seek to understand the origin of filament spin through computer simulations of how matter behaves on the largest cosmological sales. Still, right now, 'we're not really sure what can cause a torque on this scale,' Libeskind said. One possible explanation for this rotation is that as the powerful gravitational fields of these filaments pulled gas, dust and other material within them to collapse together, the resulting shearing forces might have spun up this material.

As such, whatever caused these filaments to spin must have originated later in history as the structures formed, he said. The Big Bang would not have endowed the universe with any primordial spin.

The big question is, 'Why do they spin?' Libeskind said. The scientists noted they do not suggest that every single filament in the universe spins, but that spinning filaments do seem to exist. The fastest the researchers saw galaxies whirl around the hollow centers of these tendrils was about 223,700 mph (360,000 kph). The researchers found that the way in which these galaxies moved suggested they were rotating around the central axis of each filament. Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the scientists examined more than 17,000 filaments, analyzing the velocity at which the galaxies making up these giant tubes moved within each tendril.

Spin spacie