
Spooky Alignment of Quasars Across Billions of Light-years - Zomad
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1438/
======
incision
_> "The new VLT results indicate that the rotation axes of the quasars tend to
be parallel to the large-scale structures in which they find themselves. So,
if the quasars are in a long filament then the spins of the central black
holes will point along the filament."_

Though I have no real idea what I'm talking about...

This feels intuitive to my mental picture of the universe.

The description of this large scale structure and the expansion of the
universe has always put me in mind of watching the patterns form and reform
from drips in a soapy sink or an elastic fabric being pulled apart.

In both cases, you end up with these big expanses bordered by dense stringy
areas. That the motion of the stuff that snaps / shears / collapses or
whatever into these strings and knots would be aligned seems perfectly
logical.

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madaxe_again
Conservation of angular momentum. I don't see this as all that shocking. If
you consider that the universe is growing (or at least it appears to be and to
the best of our knowledge), and that therefore at some point the matter that
now comprises these quasars was quite probably part of a single coherent
system, say, an earlier galaxy, which would have had angular momentum - all
this is showing is the angular momentum of the structure which birthed the
quasars. Which is neat.

Simple version: imagine you have a long pole which is spinning, fast. Then
imagine a ninja comes in and slices the pole up, perpendicular to its axis, so
you've got 20 short poles. The 20 short poles continue to spin on the same
axis as the original long pole. If those poles are in the vacuum of space with
nothing slowing them down, they will continue to spin in the same way for a
_very, very long time_. They might wobble a bit (precession), which explains
why the poles aren't all perfectly aligned in this data.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Our intuition does a very poor job of answering questions like this (well,
almost any questions, really) and we can spend a lot of time fooling ourselves
that the way the universe actually is "makes sense" in some intuitive way. It
doesn't. If it did, we'd have had correct physics in 1687 BCE instead of 1687
CE.

One way to test this is to ask yourself what your intuition tells you before
you know the answer. You'll mostly get it wrong, unless you have formal
training in the field. Intuitive "explanations" are only good after the fact,
and even after the fact can be misleading and problematic, as the one you
bring up here is.

The universe as a whole (very probably) has zero angular momentum. There are
consequences on the large scale if this is not the case that we'd probably
have detected by now. So early star formation, including quasar formation,
happened in a hot zero-momentum gas cloud that filled the expanding universe.
That is the structure that birthed the quasars. That means that while there
may well have been local eddies, there was not any overall rotation to the
gas. So why would quasars that formed in distant parts of that gas have their
axes aligned in the same direction?

Short version: your mental model of the early universe is not accurate, so
your intuitive explanation doesn't actually explain the phenomenon under
study. Simply because it "makes sense" of the data does not make it useful. In
particular, you've assumed a counter-factual.

The reason why cosmologists are surprised by these results is because they
have a better understanding of the early universe, and know that there is no
known mechanism to align the rotational axes of these objects. They are now
wondering what that mechanism might be. Global angular momentum is one
possibility, but it is far, far down on the list because it is contradicted by
a lot of other data.

~~~
madaxe_again
Why there's angular momentum - turbulence.

I do have formal training in the field, if a masters in physics counts, with a
specialisation in cosmology and astrophysics.

My thesis was oriented around computational simulations of the early universe,
using fluid dynamics.

------
guelo
> 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.

This was predicted so there must be some understanding of how it works.
Doesn't seem that spooky.

~~~
m0th87
I'd guess it's referring to Einstein's "spooky action at a distance"

~~~
fsloth
No, it's not. Spooky action at a distance refers to phenomena arising at the
quantum level. The scale difference between that and alignment of the
rotations of quasars is getting near the largest observable scale difference
there can be. Which, itself, is kinda satisfying :).

The spookiness here is of similar nature as the spookiness how the eurasian
continental plate seems to fit snugly with the american one although they are
now quite far apart - i.e. we should be able to figure out which past events
led to the current configuration.

I would call this result 'really cool' rather than 'spooky' but neither of
those are very specific terms ;)

~~~
anigbrowl
You're right, but the journalist probably selected that word for the
'Science!' association with the QM term.

------
deckar01
Out of "93 quasars", "19 of them found a significantly polarized signal."
"Results indicate that the rotation axes of the quasars tend to be parallel to
the large-scale structures in which they find themselves."

Do quasars that aren't parallel to their large-scale structures not have a
significantly polarized signal? Maybe interference from the structure or a
weaker signal because of their alignment?

------
hyperion2010
If we wind the clock back far enough couldn't we explain this if the original
matter that went on to form the black holes originated from blobs of matter
that were affected by the same local forces? Then we just wait long enough and
things that were next to each other in the distant past now reside long the
dark mater filaments? Given the angular momentum of these suckers I'd guess
that it is pretty hard to significantly change their axis of rotation even
over a couple billion years.

~~~
Tloewald
I don't see how that explains the axes aligning along the filaments. It might
explain the axes being aligned.

------
anigbrowl
_“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 Hutsemékers._

This seems like it might be a breakthrough result.

------
trhway
"So, if the quasars are in a long filament then the spins of the central black
holes will point along the filament."

the filament formation means the matter moving inward toward the virtual
"centerline" (the term is used here pretty loosely obviously) of the filament.
As this movement isn't perfectly aligned/balanced there is a total nonzero
angular moment of the matter kind of orbiting around the "centerline" \- the
vector of the moment pointing along the "centerline". The bigger the object
inside the filament, the more [statistically] expected its angular moment to
be aligned with the total angular moment of the filament.

~~~
feider
what? Can I have this translated "for dummies" also?

~~~
SiVal
Imagine an airplane at an airshow. It flies past with a smoke generator
belching out smoke, leaving a rough trail behind it that churns and deforms.
It's roughly a long tube of churning particles.

Now take this shape into space and make it enormously large. All of the
particles in this long, stringy, tube-shaped arrangement attract each other
gravitationally, so the tube starts to tighten. The particles around the
outside of the tube are pulled back toward the other particles in the tube,
which generally pulls them toward the centerline of the tube. Of course, each
particle will have its own momentum, so if you looked down the centerline of
the tube, you'd see some particles heading a little to one side of the
centerline, some heading toward the other. Looking down that centerline, you'd
see some particles tending to orbit around the center in a clockwise
direction, some others going counter-clockwise.

It's very unlikely that there would be the same number of particles going
clockwise around the centerline as counter-clockwise. Just randomly, there
would very likely be somewhat more particles going one way than the other, so
eventually the tightening tube would seem to be rolling around its centerline
in the majority direction.

What trhway is saying is that any really big, dense clusters of particles in
the tube would probably have roughly the same characteristics as the whole
tube they were a part of. The particles rotating around the center of a large,
dense cluster of particles in the tube would tend to resemble the rest of the
tube statistically, so they would tend to roll in the same direction as the
tube itself, meaning the axes of rotation of these big chunks would tend to be
parallel with each other and parallel to the centerline of the tube.

~~~
trhway
>What trhway is saying is that any really big, dense clusters of particles in
the tube would probably have roughly the same characteristics as the whole
tube they were a part of. The particles rotating around the center of a large,
dense cluster of particles in the tube would tend to resemble the rest of the
tube statistically, so they would tend to roll in the same direction as the
tube itself, meaning the axes of rotation of these big chunks would tend to be
parallel with each other and parallel to the centerline of the tube.

yep. Just to add that as those chunks has already clumped close together they
are forced to rotate much faster to preserve their share of angular momentum -
thus we see rotating quasars on the background of seemingly (in our
observation timescale) static filament.

------
infectoid
Ignoring the fact we can't get out there, does this give us a neat method of
orienting ourselves when travelling through these vast distances?

~~~
hrjet
Even today, the celestial co-ordinates we use are based on references to the
positions of extra-galactic radio sources. See for example ICRF (1)

(1)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Celestial_Refere...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Celestial_Reference_Frame)

------
jcromartie
This is not as spooky as what I was expecting. Maybe if all of the quasar axes
pointed at _us_...

~~~
eyeface
Well, the ones we can see are! They're very very very distant objects that are
very very bright, but they mostly emit along their axes. So, we can only
detect the ones that are pointing at us.

~~~
uglycoyote
Hmm. If the only ones that we can see are pointing at us then it seems really
unspooky that we should be able to look at quasars that are very far apart and
see that they all appear to have the same orientation. The ones which have any
other orientation are being filtered out. I'm guessing the astronomers must
have somehow accounted for this though? Seems like if all of the quasars
really were aligned then there would appear to be a lot more quasars when
observing in a direction which was parallel to the common direction along
which they emit light.

~~~
aschampion
This is not an observation of axes visible from Earth (since that is obviously
biased):

 _The team could not see the rotation axes or the jets of the quasars
directly. Instead they measured the polarisation of the light from each quasar
and, for 19 of them, found a significantly polarised signal._

Even if it had been the case that they were directly observing axes visible
from Earth, those wouldn't appear to be parallel unless they were also
proximate in the sky.

------
jevgeni
More wild speculations: could it be, that these quasars are somehow connected
through some yet unknown medium, that allows such behaviour? I mean it's
difficult to sync clocks on several computers in the same building, how the
hell could massive, hulking rotating blobs of pure gravity billions of light
years apart "sync"?

~~~
graycat
Because in some rough sense, at one time all the blobs, filaments, etc. were
close together and, there, got _coordinated_.

~~~
jevgeni
Those sneaky assholes...

------
givan
Reminds me of
[http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/08/14/science/2006081...](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/08/14/science/20060815_SCILL_GRAPHIC.html)

------
acscott
If you randomly sampled a set of 93 dice floating in space from a set of
200,000, what are the odds that 20 of them are closely aligned along the same
axes?

Is this a fair analogous question?

------
venomsnake
Isn't this on (way smaller) scale how the Solar system works? The spin of the
planets and their axes are similar and mostly aligned?

------
kraig911
Could this be the sign of a larger type of object in the cosmos? That would be
neat.

------
mrfusion
Dumb question alert. Could an advanced civilization have done this? Perhaps to
collect power?

~~~
mrfusion
To the down voter. If you think an advanced alien civilization is out of hand
then why does SETI exist? Why did we put messages on voyager?

~~~
daeken
SETI exists for that tiny, tiny chance that in the few years (very, very, very
few) we look at data, the Earth is receiving transmissions from a remote part
of the universe. Voyager's messages are far more likely to make contact with
an alien species, since they'll be around effectively forever. It's just a
matter of whether that happens while we're still in existence.

~~~
aruggirello
Voyager's won't reach the nearest star before 40,000 years, but, dunno, are
any of the two actually _aimed_ at any neighbouring star? I mean, come one,
having a Voyager pass by some anonymous star at 170 light years of distance in
1,2 million years, and never come closer than 2650 AU to the star, what's the
chance of actually detecting it by ET - even if an advanced civilisation is
(will be) watching from one of its planets. It's tiny and, by the time it
arrives, even the radioactivity levels will have dwindled to nothing. The only
things that would make it stand out is it's speed, and the fact it's made of
metal. They would need a very advanced radar, capable of detecting tiny masses
of metal at enormous distances. Then, to investigate it, they would basically
have to go grab it - but would you justify hunting for _any_ chuck of metal
transiting by the Oort cloud - what if it were just a piece of debris from an
asteroid?!

~~~
hrjet
But you don't know what advances would happen in 40,000 years, that too on
another solar system. Maybe alien kids would be playing in their back-yard
beside their Oort cloud equivalent and might check out Voyager just for fun.

~~~
drgath
Seems far more likely that in 40k years, humans will have discovered the
ability of interstellar travel. Heck, at that point we could go out and fetch
Voyager 1 ourselves before it comes within 1.6 light years of AC+79 3888. If
we can't in 40k years, it's likely not possible that we'll ever leave this
solar system. It could be that's it's just not physically possible. But more
likely, do we survive long enough to develop that technology?

I've always viewed the Golden Record as a way to make humanity feel better
about its future. The need to leave a legacy behind is core to who we are, and
that's exactly what we did with those two discs. We left something behind that
will survive for 1 billion years, with the infinitesimally small hopes that
someone will find it. But, it makes us feel good.

~~~
adamio
This is a related effort
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KEO](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KEO)

------
biomimic
The golden ratio at work.

------
Area12
"We apologise for the inconvenience"

------
dogpa
Bad title.

------
carsongross
Another severe blow to the cosmological principle.

~~~
genwin
The principle is meant to apply only at a sufficiently large scale. If any
particular scale goes against the principle, one can enlarge the scale to see
if the principle still applies.

~~~
hachiya
And if all else fails, just scale out further... until you're effectively
outside the universe.

Stipulate the presence of additional universes.

Then call the whole theoretical collection a "multiverse."

Voilà. We have no reason to believe this reflects reality, but it must be
assumed...

...in order to preserve the Cosmological Principle.

~~~
Dylan16807
genwin is talking about actual measurements, not speculation. Why are you
throwing out a strawman?

