All galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centre, but they are only called quasars when matter gets too close, heats up to millions of degrees and then blasts out enormous amounts of radiation, or jets.

THERE’S something odd about black holes. Not only do they twist the laws of physics into infinity, they’ve now been discovered to be eerily aligned.

Or at least it seems so. The science isn’t fully “in”. But what we have is highly tantalising.

And nobody knows why.

Fresh data gathered by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) indicates there is an unusual alignment between enormous interstellar objects called quasars. Does this mean there is an underlying structure on a cosmic scale?

“This is really cool,” says Swinbourne University astrophysicist Dr Alan Duffy. “Quasars are some of the brightest things in the universe, yet they’re actually caused by the darkest objects known — supermassive black holes.”

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The key is in the rotation of these black holes: Their axes, the direction in which they spin, appear to be inextricably — and inexplicably — linked.

They appear to be “parallel to each other over distances of billions of light-years,” the ESO researches from the University of Liege in Belgium say.

Dr Duffy puts this in context: “If true, this is like finding spinning tops spread out across space 15 times longer than our entire solar system are all tilted in the same direction.”

Their research, entitled Alignment of quasar polarisations with large-scale structures, was published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Quasars spill the beans

At the centre of this observation are quasars: Hungry supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies which eject long jets of extremely hot matter like a beacon into space.

We cannot see the black holes themselves. But we can certainly see their “exhaust”.

“The intense gravity of the black hole causes material to swirl around (like water down a plughole) heating up as it gets closer and spins faster until it’s glowing white (actually X-ray!) hot,” Dr Duffy says.

It’s not as though they’re difficult to spot. These quasars often shine brighter than all the rest of the stars in their galaxy combined.

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The study centred on 93 such bright quasars dating back to a time when the universe was only a third of its current age. Of these, 19 revealed enough information about their alignments to be measured.

“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 team leader Damien Hutsemékers.

Interstellar ‘web’ exposed?

A closer look at the spacing of these quasars also revealed they were not evenly distributed.

“They form a cosmic web of filaments and clumps around huge voids where galaxies are scarce,” a statement from the research team reads.

The quasars appear to be positioned in parallel to the “filament” in which they belong, the researchers say.

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Dr Duffy says the reason for this alignment could be because material flows in along an enormous filaments of dark matter called the Cosmic Web. “The material that grows the black hole comes in like a river from a given direction rather than from all directions like rain, causing the black holes to all spin in a similar direction along the strands of this web.”

Statistically uncertain result

Just a matter of chance? The ESO scientists think not, stating calculations that the probability of such an alignment being simply random is less than 1 per cent.

But Dr Duffy says a much large sample size is needed to be certain.

“It’s surprising to see the black hole spins lining up in galaxies across huge distances but the beauty of science is we can look at more of the universe and test this idea to see if it holds.”

The ESO researchers, however, remain confident.

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“A correlation between the orientation of quasars and the structure they belong to is an important prediction of numerical models of evolution of our Universe,” research team member Dominique Sluse says.

“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 says.