Monday, November 24, 2014

A 'spooky alignment' of quasars, or just hype?

from Blank On The Map

In the news this week we've had a story on the alignment of quasar spins with large-scale structure, based on this paper by Hutsemekers et al. The paper was accompanied by this press release from the European Space Observatory, which was then reproduced in various forms in a number of blogs and news outlets — almost all of which stress the 'spooky' or 'mysterious' nature of the claimed alignment 'over billions of light years'.

At least one of these blogs (the one at The Daily Galaxy) explicitly claims that the alignment of these quasar spins is a challenge for the cosmological principle, which is the assumption of large-scale statistical homogeneity and isotropy of the Universe, on which all of modern cosmology is based. This claim is not contained in the press release, but originates from a statement in the paper itself, where the authors say
The existence of correlations in quasar axes over such extreme scales would constitute a serious anomaly for the cosmological principle.
I'm afraid that this claim is completely unsupported by any of the actual results contained within the paper, and is therefore one of those annoying examples of scientific hype. In this post I will try to explain why.

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