Black holes at the cores of galaxies tend to spin in the same direction.

This unexpected result comes from a survey of 65 galaxies in the same patch of sky by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope near Pune in India. Andrew Russ Taylor and Preshanth Jagannathan at the University of Cape Town in South Africa measured the orientation of jets of plasma shooting out from the strong magnetic fields swirling near the supermassive black holes. They found that more than a dozen jets pointed in the same direction, suggesting that the black holes have the same spin direction. Their galaxies, which are tens of millions of light years apart, form a large 'filament' across the sky.

The galaxies may have all spawned from one enormous structure of rotating gas in the early Universe, the authors suggest.

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 459, L36–L40 (2016)