Royal Astronomical Society | University of Western Cape | University of Cape Town | 2016 Apr 11
[img3="An image of 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.Deep radio imaging by researchers in the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape has revealed that supermassive black holes in 64 galaxies are all spinning out radio jets in the same direction – most likely a result of primordial mass fluctuations in the early universe ...
(Credit: Prof Russ Taylor)"]https://www.ras.org.uk/images/stories/p ... Images.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
The new result is the discovery – for the first time – of an alignment of the jets of radio galaxies over a large volume of space, a finding made possible by a three-year deep radio imaging survey of radio waves coming from a region called ELAIS-N1 region using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT).
The radio jets are produced by the supermassive black holes at the centres 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 Prof Andrew Russ Taylor ...
"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," he notes.
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. ...
Alignments of Radio Galaxies in Deep Radio Imaging of ELAIS N1 - A.R. Taylor, P. Jagannathan
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 459(1):L36 (2016 Jun 11) DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slw038
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1603.02418 > 08 Mar 2016
