canderso
So, the larger the black hole, the more the concentration of stars around it, so the higher the concentration of quasars. Doesnt seem mysterious to me. Seems more like odds of the gravity pulling in more stars.
Fretting Freddy the Ferret pressing the Fret
It's the alignment of the rotation axis for quasars that is special here, not the concentration.
Arf
canderoso, I believe the massive black at the center of these galaxies IS the quasar--they were named quasars (quasi-stellar radio source I think) back before they knew that they were actually massive black holes at the center of galaxies.
Snatr
The second photo really looks like neurons to me :-)
Al Dutcher
Or, is it that the intervening stuff in the universe is filtering the light for a particular polarization? It might not be the rotational axis at all.
Paul Bedichek
It's unbelievably mysterious, they are separated by billions of light years and all are pointed the same way as well as the rest of galaxies also aligned that way.
Techtwit
So, God doesn't play dice with the Universe (Albert Einstein) but maybe He plays spinning tops?
Philip Sheffield
Of course I'm no astrophysicist, but this makes me wonder if the origin of these early supermassive black holes occurred during the Big Bang itself—as atom sized primordial nano holes. And then were spread apart throughout the early universe during the microseconds of Cosmic Inflation.
Tintas
It seems like we are living inside a large organism. Recent space images seems to suggest it. Most of them look like organic structures. Funny as you can actually see the same thing if you compare a cell with a galaxy or an atom with a solar system.
gregole
Reading the paper, you will see the researchers found 19 of 93 were highly polarized, and "quasar polarization vectors are either parallel or perpendicular to the directions of the large-scale structures to which they belong. Statistical tests indicate that the probability that this effect can be attributed to randomly oriented polarization vectors is of the order of 1%."
This is uncanny and fascinating; but 19 of 93 were highly polarized - what about the remaining approximately 80% that are not polarized? Why are 20% highly polarized?