[doug-moen]

It's true, there is no absolute direction for which way a wheel spins. It's relative to the observer.

If you are standing on the side of a road, and a bicycle goes by, then you may observe the wheels to rotate clockwise, while an observer on the other side of the road will observe the same wheels to rotate counter-clockwise.

The sun is said to rotate around the centre of the milky way galaxy once every 225 million years. Over that time frame, some of the galaxies we observe will flip between clockwise and counterclockwise rotation as our viewpoint changes.

But that isn't relevant here. The Space article is too vague and handwavy to make any conclusions about the research, and should be ignored. Only the original scientific paper is worth reading: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798?logi...

Section 5.2 "Physics of Galaxy Rotation" seems particularly relevant.

> due to the Doppler shift effect galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way are expected to be slightly brighter than galaxies that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way. Therefore, more galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way are expected to be observed from Earth, and the difference should peak at around the Galactic pole. That observation is conceptually aligned with the empirical data of Fig. 10, and the observation using JADES described in Section 3.

You should read the paper for the full argument.