>"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.
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.
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.
> Conservation of angular momentum. I don't see this as all that shocking.
What is fascinating is that the angular momentum seems to be roughly aligned with the underlying "membranes", as if the voids themselves are actually expanding.
> 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.
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?
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.
“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.
"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.
At first glance it seems so, but afterwards it still seems like nothing has changed for the space travellers. Maybe the picture gives an illusion of a 2D birds eye view hence looking simpler than the reality.
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.
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"?
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?
Sure. A dumb civilization could have done it too, perhaps as something to do with crystals or the Zodiac.
But in all seriousness, Occam's Razor is a great tool here. So far, every cosmological problem we believe we've figured out has occurred due to natural processes. There is very likely something we don't know about large scale structures (an understatement!).
[+] [-] incision|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] madaxe_again|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kahirsch|11 years ago|reply
Why would you expect the ninja to do this? Why would you expect large-scale structures of the universe to form parallel to the quasars' axes?
As far as we can tell, the alignment of planetary systems in the Milky Way are random.[1]
[1] http://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/546/why-is-our-...
[+] [-] gorhill|11 years ago|reply
What is fascinating is that the angular momentum seems to be roughly aligned with the underlying "membranes", as if the voids themselves are actually expanding.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] guelo|11 years ago|reply
This was predicted so there must be some understanding of how it works. Doesn't seem that spooky.
[+] [-] acqq|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0th87|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deckar01|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tloewald|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|11 years ago|reply
This seems like it might be a breakthrough result.
[+] [-] trhway|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] infectoid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrjet|11 years ago|reply
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Celestial_Refere...
[+] [-] has2k1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcromartie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eyeface|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jevgeni|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graycat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|11 years ago|reply
So, there might be some possibilities.
[+] [-] givan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acscott|11 years ago|reply
Is this a fair analogous question?
[+] [-] venomsnake|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kraig911|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mrfusion|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GotAnyMegadeth|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devb|11 years ago|reply
But in all seriousness, Occam's Razor is a great tool here. So far, every cosmological problem we believe we've figured out has occurred due to natural processes. There is very likely something we don't know about large scale structures (an understatement!).
[+] [-] mrfusion|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] biomimic|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Area12|11 years ago|reply