Spooky Alignment of Quasars Across Billions of Light-years
Conservation of angular momentum. I don't see this as all that shocking. If you consider that the universe is growing (or at least it appears to be and to the best of our knowledge), and that therefore at some point the matter that now comprises these quasars was quite probably part of a single coherent system, say, an earlier galaxy, which would have had angular momentum - all this is showing is the angular momentum of the structure which birthed the quasars. Which is neat.<p>Simple version: imagine you have a long pole which is spinning, fast. Then imagine a ninja comes in and slices the pole up, perpendicular to its axis, so you've got 20 short poles. The 20 short poles continue to spin on the same axis as the original long pole. If those poles are in the vacuum of space with nothing slowing them down, they will continue to spin in the same way for a <i>very, very long time</i>. They might wobble a bit (precession), which explains why the poles aren't  all perfectly aligned in this data.