Expert: Courtney Seligman - 2/13/2011

Question
like our northern and southern hemisperes in relation to tornados and cyclone rotation.do planets and galaxies rotate in different directions in northern and southern hemisperes of the universe.

Answer
No, they don't. The Coriolis effect which leads to the phenomena you mention on Earth is due to the Earth's relatively rapid eastward rotation (for a more detailed discussion, see http://cseligman.com/text/planets/coriolis.htm; unfortunately, the Illinois WW2010 link is broken, but I can give you other references if you want still more details). The Universe doesn't have any net rotation, and even individual galaxies rotate so slowly in comparison to their size that individual stars and groups of stars have completely random rotations relative to their overall surroundings. You can tell this by taking a look at a picture of a cluster of galaxies (for instance, at http://cseligman.com/text/galaxies/clusters.htm which has images of several clusters). For the elliptical galaxies it's difficult to tell how they are rotating (if at all), but the spiral galaxies have position angles (the direction of their disc plane) in all directions, indicating that they are rotating in different directions, independently of each other and the overall structure of the cluster.

Finally, I should note that since there isn't any overall rotation of the Universe, there isn't really a "northern" or "southern" side, either. There happens to be a large "sheet" of galaxies and clusters of galaxies which are fairly close to us, which we use to define the "supergalactic plane", and the side of that which is on the northern side of the Earth is called the northern side of the supergalactic plane, and the opposite side is the southern side. That allows us to define the position (that is, the direction) of different galaxies and clusters relative to our local region; but it has no significance for the Universe as a whole.