from the careful-where-you-point-those-things dept.
Quasars are galaxies with very active supermassive black holes at their centres. 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 can shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together.
A team led by Damien Hutsemékers from the University of Liège in Belgium used the FORS instrument on the VLT to study 93 quasars that were known to form huge groupings spread over billions of light-years, seen at a time when the Universe was about one third of its current age.
"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.
The team then went further and looked to see if the rotation axes were linked, not just to each other, but also to the structure of the Universe on large scales at that time.
[Source]: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1438/
[Paper]: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1438/eso1438a.pdf
(Score: 1) by johnck on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:09PM
... if they are billions of light years apart and they appear to be in alignment, aren't they actually out of alignment because the light from the other quasars, what we're actually seeing, is from billions of years ago?
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:21PM
Hey! You are assuming that the entire universe is not just a single speck, holographically projecting itself to create the appearance of space and time.
Get with the program!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 1) by johnck on Thursday November 20 2014, @09:22PM
A fellow Reformed Neo Buddhist, I see!
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:22PM
IANAS either, but it doesn't matter. They're spinning, which makes them quite stable over time. So seing several of them have rotation axes aligned over such distance is remarkable.
The same could be said about galaxies, if we found out a significant part of them have similar rotation axes, that would be interesting because it could tell us e.g. that they could have interacted together when the universe was more denser.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:23PM
From the summary, emphasis added:
I think they probably took the difference in timezones into account.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:26PM
Eh? I can't work out what you mean - can you elaborate?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by MozeeToby on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:33PM
Imagine that in addition to spinning they are also tumbling slowly around a different axis. If they tumble at a rate of once per billion years (i.e. much more slowly than we could hope to detect) and one is a mere 200 million light years closer to us their apparent alignment could be an illusion created by our perspective.
I don't really buy that, the odds of such a coincidence happening several times over makes it unlikely IMO, but I think that's what he's getting at.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:58PM
TFA (sorry, had to) states that the scientists give that alignment a 1% chance of happening, under the current model.
Either the model is wrong, or someone got really lucky with their sample of 93 quasars
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:25PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:30PM
But if two quasars are almost equally distant from us, although they might be aligned differently today they certainly were aligned together at that time. And what if they're all at different distances and yet all aligned to each other. It becomes hard to believe in coincidence when the pattern is repeated over large numbers. At one point you have to swallow a lot of coincidences... or make a hypothesis.
(Score: 1) by DBCubix on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:21PM
The first odd thing we noticed was that some of the quasars' rotation axes were aligned with each other
I rolled six dice and three of them came up 5's. Spooky! I think the description is being a disservice to the article.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Dunbal on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:35PM
With dice it's hard to get a 5.25 or 5.75. With an axis of rotation you have a whole 360 degrees to chose from. While it's possible that it's mere coincidence it's also possible that it's not. That's why people try to explain observations with hypotheses that can be tested. We call that "science".
(Score: 1) by JNCF on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:40PM
I think his comment was making fun of the summary, not the scientists. Note the last sentense.
(Score: 3, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:29PM
The headline, summary, and quotes from the article tease that this is some unexpected bizarre finding, but then later there is this quote:
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. Our data provide the first observational confirmation of this effect
Which makes it sound like it was expected. But then:
"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," concludes Dominique Sluse.
So I'm just left confused and hungry. I may have been hungry already.
Also, just in case anyone else needs closure on the summary:
The team then went further and looked to see if the rotation axes were linked, not just to each other, but also to the structure of the Universe on large scales at that time.
Spoiler alert: they are.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by KiloByte on Thursday November 20 2014, @09:42PM
Please explain this to a non-physicist: lengths smaller than Planck length don't make a physical sense. This means, same applies to non-integer fractions bigger than 1: 1.5 is bad because 1.5-1 is bad. Ie, all spacetime coordinates are integers, albeit with a scale so big that it's currently inconceivable to come with an experiment which shows them being discrete.
But this means we're on a grid. The number of dimensions makes this complex: in a 2D space, the three possible regular grids: triangular, square and hexagonal produce (contrary to common intuition) the same results in higher scales, yet in higher-dimensional topologies we can have notions of neighbourhood pretty different than those of an Euclidean space. Thus, there is a graph where the state of a cell in the next step can depend only on nodes no more than 1 edge away (let's call that "c" :p), yet certain effects can have a larger apparent speed in the lowest dimensions.
Such a grid would cause a bias for certain directions. This bias wouldn't be noticeable on smaller scales (unless you can devise some proper experiment), but comparing this set of quasars we have distances on the order of the radius of the observable universe.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 1) by maxim on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:14PM
You are onto the structure of the Matrix...
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:19PM
Please explain this to a non-physicist:
Alright, I'll give it a go, but I don't know why you're asking me, also a non-physicist (I mean, I got an A at A-level, but I don't think we even covered relativity back then).
lengths smaller than Planck length don't make a physical sense.
From Wikipedia: "There is currently no proven physical significance of the Planck length"
This means, same applies to non-integer fractions bigger than 1:
No it doesn't.
1.5 is bad because 1.5-1 is bad.
What?
Ie, all spacetime coordinates are integers
Nope.
But this means we're on a grid
Aaand nope. I think you can see where I'm going with this.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday November 20 2014, @11:29PM
unless you can devise some proper experiment
I'll give it a try. There's a kind of basically obsolete microwave oscillator called a yig osc that wiggles a round ball in a magnet. Its pretty trivial to measure time/freq stuff to less than 1e-12, far less. So you hook up a flexible piece of coaxial cable and watch the freq as it detects the earth rotate around the sun and all that. Except nothing like that shows up. So the effect must be way less than 1e-15, 1e-20 whatever. Not saying its impossible, but it must be mighty small.
Also see "michealson morley experiment".
(Score: 1) by KiloByte on Friday November 21 2014, @09:17AM
Yes, the effect is way less than 1e-12 (or modern Michelson-Morley 1e-17), that's what I'm saying. The grid's cells are sized at 1.6e-35 meters; comparing this with lengths used in these experiments you'd need a massively better resolution to find any anisotrophy.
The set of quasars here has some points around 2e26 meters away, although it's far easier to detect them closer, thus the set is biased. Still, it is big enough compared to some structures such as, eg, radius of a baryon, that anisotrophy might be apparent. This might explain the alignment we're seeing here.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday November 21 2014, @03:31AM
There's quantum uncertainty happening, even at this level. This means that if it's a grid, it's not regular, it's random, with random local connections, and no preferred directions. Well, 'local' is a bit redundant, because these connections are what *defines* local. And even the idea of 'direction' is only a larger-scale phenomenon.
What we see macroscopically is likely a quantum superposition of a lot of different irregular grids. The 'loop quantum gravity' theory (one of several quantum gravity theories) claims that by quantizing the general relativistic field equations and solving them, the result is essentially this random grid structure, and in the large it turns out to be 3+1-dimensional space-time. I don't yet know how the math works out; I'm still stuck on the early chapters of Rivelli's book.
One of the slogans there is that the gravitational field isn't something that happens *in* space-time; the gravitational field *is* space-time.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 21 2014, @02:22PM
Must be those quantum effects, making massive quasars align, huh? Cool, we're closer to the T.O.E.!