In a shocking observation, researchers discovered the central supermassive black holes in a sample of quasars are aligned with each other.
The research team also noticed these giant objects are aligned with other objects within their "cosmic web," the European Southern Observatory (ESA) reported. Quasars are galaxies containing extremely active central black holes that shine more brightly than all of the stars surrounding them. The findings were made using SO's Very Large Telescope (VLT).
To make their findings the researchers looked at 93 quasars that existed when the universe was only about one-third of its current age.
"The first odd thing we noticed was that some of the quasars' rotation axes were aligned with each other -- despite the fact that these quasars are separated by billions of light-years," said study leader Damien Hutsemékers from the University of Liège.
A closer look revealed the quasars form a "cosmic web" of filaments and clumps that sit in regions where galaxies are scarce, these extraterrestrial arrangements of material is known as a large-scale structure. The chance of the extraordinary alignment is less than 1 percent.
"A correlation between the orientation of quasars and the structurethey belong to is an important prediction of numerical models of evolution of our Universe. Our data provide the first observational confirmation of this effect, on scales much larger that what had been observed to date for normal galaxies," said Dominique Sluse of the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie in Bonn, Germany and University of Liège.
The researchers could not directly observe the rotation axes of the quasars directly, but measured the polarized light from each one to determine the angle of the accretion disc and direction of the spin axis.
"The alignments in the new data, on scales even bigger than current predictions from simulations, may be a hint that there is a missing ingredient in our current models of the cosmos," Sluse concluded.
