Fingers of God

When all objects are plotted with their distances set strictly by redshift, clumps of matter are always elliptical instead of spherical, with the major axis of the ellipse pointing directly at us, and there are larger patterns also exhibiting an orientation toward us, as in Figure 1.¹

 

 

Figure 1. Fingers of God

 

 

Since there is no reason to believe that there is anything special about our sector of the Universe, this is most likely an artifact of the way we measure distance. In a spherical galaxy that is rotating, the stars moving away from (or toward) us will have a higher (or lower) redshift. So if we plot the positions just based on redshift, the spherical galaxy will appear to be elliptical.