Astronomers Spot Alignment of Quasars Over Billions of Light-Years

Astronomers have spotted an unusual alignment spread across our universe. They've discovered 93 quasars that have formed huge groupings spread over billions of light-years at a time when the universe was at a third of its current age.

Quasars are galaxies with very active supermassive black holes at their centers. These black holes are surrounded by spinning discs of extremely hot material that is often spewed out in long jets along their axes of rotation. Quasars are often so bright that they can shine more brightly than all of the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together.

In this latest study, though, the researchers noticed something odd about the quasars that they spotted. Some of the quasars' rotation axes were aligned with each other, despite the fact that these quasars were separated by billions of light-years.

The astronomers then examined to see whether the rotation axes were linked not just to each other, but also to the structure of the universe on large scales at that time. When then looked at the distribution of galaxies on scales of billions of light-years, they found that they were not evenly distributed. Instead, they formed a cosmic web of filaments and clumps around huge voids; this arrangement is known as large-scale structure.

"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," said Dominique Sluse, one of the researchers, in a news release. "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."

The findings are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.