Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2015

SPACE CHRONICLES N ew observations with ESO’s Very Large Tele- scope (VLT) in Chile have revealed alignments over the largest structures ever discovered in the Uni- verse. A European research team has found that the rotation axes of the cen- tral supermassive black holes in a sample of qua- sars are parallel to each other over distances of bil- lions of light-years. The team has also found that the rotation axes of these quasars tend to be aligned with the vast structures in the cosmic web in which they reside. Quasars are gal- axies with very active su- permassive black holes at their centres. These black holes are surrounded by spinning discs of extreme- ly hot material that is of- ten spewed out in long jets along their axes of ro- tation. Quasars can shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together. A team led by Damien Hut- semékers from the Univer- sity of Liège in Belgium used the FORS instrument on the VLT to study 93 qua- sars that were known to Spooky alignment of quasars across billions of light-years by ESO