Estudio estadístico de la dirección de rotación en galaxias espirales

Abstract

Humanity has always found certain interest in all that surrounds it, including the sky. This curiosity caused a change from the myths to the use of the reasoning as a tool to understand the world. In the XVII century, the curiosity for the skies expanded through the invention of the first telescopes and the new observations these instruments allowed, opening a window towards a novel paradigm. The constant development of the tools to observe the sky lead, among many others, to the discovery of galaxies by Hubble in the XX century, along with different studies of these objects in said century. Hubble himself classified this new kind of astronomical objects according to their morphology. Among the most relevant features, the spiral structure displayed by some of them stands out. These also called spiral galaxies present an ordered rotation as well. Both theoretical and observational studies seem to agree in the fact that, in most galaxies, their spiral arms should point in the opposite direction of the sense of rotation. As an statistical study about this topic has not been made since the 80s and today new databases like CALIFA and DESI are available, it seems relevant to work on a new study on the orientation of spiral arms.