Something strange is happening in the far reaches of our universe. About a dozen supermassive black holes all throw out colossal amounts of energy in the same direction. It is possible that this is a common coincidence on a cosmic scale, but some astronomers suspect that it may be due to more powerful third forces than these black holes.
Supermassive black holes, found in the centers of almost all nearby galaxies known to us, periodically eject powerful streams of high-energy plasma from their bowels into intergalactic space. For example, the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A *, located at the center of our Milky Way, will someday swallow the central star of its region, and the event will herald a massive release of X-rays throughout our galaxy. Such events attract the attention of astronomers very much, although it is almost impossible to predict them.
Observation of 64 galaxies, located about halfway the distance of the known universe, showed a very unusual synchronism in the direction of the ejected energy from a dozen black holes located hundreds of millions of light years apart. A phenomenon such as this, according to scientists, should not exist in our universe, unless all this energy is attracted by a structure larger than all these black holes.
According to Russ Taylor, the lead expert of this observation, who published the first results of the study in the scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, it is quite possible that this is the case. As the Science News site points out, Taylor suspects that all of these energy eruptions have lined up (aligned) along the strands of the cosmic web, forming a kind of mock-up (or scaffolding, if you will) of a cosmic scale. If this hypothesis is correct, then it can help explain to us how our universe took the form that it possesses.
Not everyone agrees with this opinion. Some astronomers, for example, believe that the number of galaxies studied in this matter is too small to draw such conclusions, and the whole picture should be considered no more than bizarre, but random. However, the idea of cosmic alignment along filaments turned out to be so interesting that Taylor and his colleagues plan to continue research in this direction based on observations of a large number of black holes. In addition, scientists are going to find out a more accurate distance between the galaxies that they studied.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK