Researchers in South Africa used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India to discover something strange in the distant universe, so bizarre that is not explained by the current cosmological models and theories.

The images revealed a cluster of supermassive black holes in a faraway region of the universe, all spinning out radio jets in the same direction like compass needles. What is even strange the galaxies they occupy are aligned across distances of billions of light years. This is first-of-its-kind discovery, the occurrence should be impossible.

Astronomers report their findings in a new study published in the journal Monthly Notices Letters of the Royal Society. Initially, astronomers looked for the faintest radio signals in the universe and then they seized black holes’ bizarre alignment.

GMRT is one of the largest and most sensitive radio telescope arrays in the world, but we really need MeerKAT to make the very sensitive maps, over a very large area and with great detail, that will be necessary to differentiate between possible explanations,

Andrew Russ Taylor explained in a news release.

It opens up a whole new research area for these instruments, which will probe as deeply into the and as far back as we can go — it’s going to be an exciting time to be an astronomer.

Astronomers don’t know for sure why all these black holes’ jet point in the same direction but this mean something, the only way for this alignment to exists is that supermassive black holes are 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.

This latest revelation may give astronomers clues about the structure of the earlier universe when black holes formed, it also may improve our models and simulation of universe’s early evolution.

We’re beginning to understand how the large-scale structure of the universe came about,

explained Taylor.