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Supermassive Black-Hole Jets Found Aligned in Same Direction

"Bizarre! Not Based on Current Understanding of Cosmology"

The Daily Galaxy, April 11, 2016



"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," notes Andrew Russ Taylor, University of Cape Town, Director of the recently-launched Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy.

Deep radio imaging by researchers in the University of Cape Town and University of the Western Cape, in South Africa, has revealed that supermassive black holes in a region of the distant universe are all spinning out radio jets in the same direction – most likely a result of primordial mass fluctuations in the early universe. The astronomers publish their results in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The new result is the discovery – for the first time – of an alignment of the jets of galaxies over a large volume of space, a finding made possible by a three-year deep radio imaging survey of the radio waves coming from a region called ELAIS-N1 using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT).

The jets are produced by the supermassive black holes at the centers of these galaxies, and the only way for this alignment to exist is if supermassive black holes are all spinning in the same direction, says Taylor, joint UWC/UCT SKA Chair and principal author of the Monthly Notices study. This implies that there is a coherent spin in the structure of this volume of space that was formed from the primordial mass fluctuations that seeded the creation of the large-scale structure of the universe.

With study co-author – and UCT PhD student currently working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro, New Mexico, USA – Preshanth Jagannathan, the team discovered the alignment after the initial image had been made. Within the large-scale structure, there were regions where the spin axes of galaxies lined up. The image below shows the deep radio map covering the ELAIS-N1 region, with aligned galaxy jets. The image on the left has white circles around the aligned galaxies; the image on the right is without the circles. (Russ Taylor)

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http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2016/04/supermassive-black-hole-jets-found-aligned-in-same-direction-bizarre-finding-not-based-on-current-un.html

Amazing news! We now have important information about what the early universe was like immediately after its birth. Symmetry formed from the chaos, leaving patterns after the Big Bang.

Science is so cool. New information is always welcome, as it adds to what we can THINK about.

Isn't that exactly like a Free Press to Democracy?