A team of researchers form the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Western Cape (UWT) in South Africa discovered supermassive black holes in a region of the universe that possess jets in the same alignment. The results were discovered using a three-year deep radio imaging survey of the radio waves emitted from the ELAIS-N1 region of space using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT).
The team believes that the jets - produced by the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies in the distant universe - could only be aligned if they were spinning in the same direction.
"Since these black holes don't know about each other, or have any way of exchanging information or influencing each other directly over such vast scales, this spin alignment must have occurred during the formation of the galaxies in the early universe," said Andrew Taylor, principal author of the study and director of the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy.
Taylor believes that the spin in the structure of the volume of space containing these supermassive black holes was created from the primordial mass fluctuations that eventually stimulated the large-scale structure of the universe.
The team was initially exploring faint radio sources in the distant universe before they stumbled upon the unique alignments of the galaxies and their supermassive black holes. These alignments are important in understanding the evolution and orientation of galaxies as well as the fluctuations in primordial matter that eventually created the large-scale structure of the universe.
"This is not obviously expected based on our current understanding of cosmology," said Romeel Dave, a UWC professor who was not involved in the study. "It's a bizarre finding."
Although a large-scale spin distribution has never been predicted by theories, the new findings shed light on the possibility of these theories needing refinement and will push scientists to continue to search for the secrets of the cosmos.
"We're beginning to understand how the large-scale structure of the universe came about, starting from the Big Bang and growing as a result of disturbances in the early universe, to what we have today, and that helps us explore what the universe of tomorrow will be like," Taylor said.
The findings were published March 8 on the pre-print server arXiv.
