discovery of fairy circles in australia supports selforganization theory vegetation gap patterns in arid grasslands such as the fairy circles of namibia are one of natures greatest mysteries and subject to a lively debate on their origin they are characterized by smallscale hexagonal ordering of circular baresoil gaps that persists uniformly in the landscape scale to form a homogeneous distribution patternformation theory predicts that such highly ordered gap patterns should be found also in other waterlimited systems across the globe even if the mechanisms of their formation are different here we report that so far unknown fairy circles with the same spatial structure exist 10000 km away from namibia in the remote outback of australia combining fieldwork remote sensing spatial pattern analysis and processbased mathematical modeling we demonstrate that these patterns emerge by selforganization with no correlation with termite activity the driving mechanism is a positive biomasswater feedback associated with water runoff and biomassdependent infiltration rates the remarkable match between the patterns of australian and namibian fairy circles and model results indicate that both patterns emerge from a nonuniform stationary instability supporting a central universality principle of patternformation theory applied to the context of dryland vegetation this principle predicts that different systems that go through the same instability type will show similar vegetation patterns even if the feedback mechanisms and resulting soilwater distributions are different as we indeed found by comparing the australian and the namibian fairycircle ecosystems these results suggest that biomasswater feedbacks and resultant vegetation gap patterns are likely more common in remote drylands than is currently known