Universe Today
As Prof. Andrew Russ Taylor - the joint UWC/UCT SKA Chair, Director of the recently-launched Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy, and principal author of the Monthly Notices study - explained: "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."
Furthermore, the presence of alignments of this nature could shed light on the orientation and evolution of these galaxies, particularly in relation to large-scale structures. They could also help astronomer to learn more about the motions in the primordial matter fluctuations that gave rise to the current structure of the Universe. As Taylor and the other authors of the paper also note, it will be interesting to compare this with predictions of angular momentum structure from universe simulations.
In recent years, several simulations have been produced to model the large-sale structure of the Universe and how it evolved. These include, but are not limited to, the FastSound project - which has been surveying galaxies in the Universe using the Subaru Telescope’s Fiber Multi-Object Spectrograph (FMOS) - and the DESI Project, which will rely on the Mayall Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona to chart the history of the Universe going back 11 billion years and create an extremely precise 3D map.
And then there's the Australian Square-Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a radio telescope currently being commissioned by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia. When completed, the ASKAP array will combine fast survey speed and high sensitivity to study the early Universe.
In the coming years, these projects, combined with this new information about the alignments of supermassive black holes, are likely to shed some serious light on how the Universe came to be, from creation to the present day. As Taylor puts it, "We’re beginning to understand how the large-scale structure of the universe came about, starting from the Big Bang and growing as a result of disturbances in the early universe, to what we have today, and that helps us explore what the universe of tomorrow will be like."