Why do galaxies spin? #shorts

By Dr. Becky

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There are trillions of galaxies out there in the Universe, and almost all of them are spinning. Our galaxy of stars the Milky Way is spinning. Andromeda is spinning. And once a galaxy gets its spin, it keeps it. There’s no friction in space to stop it. So what’s going on here? Well for that we have to go back to the beginning. To the early days of the Universe when all there is a hot, dense soup of matter and energy. But crucially, it's not perfectly smooth. There are tiny differences, where some regions are slightly denser than others. Which makes more matter clump there, and slowly but surely gravity pulls in more material from surrounding regions pulling material in and setting it moving. That's the seed of a galaxy’s spin. And it’s in these denser regions that galaxies first start to form, but they’re incredibly messy. Gas is flooding in from all directions. Massive bursts of star formation are driving huge outflows of gas. Everything is turbulent, everything is disrupted. So the