NASA's Cassini Spacecraft Obtains Best Views of Saturn Hexagon

[Eugene]

Source: NASA

NASA's Cassini Spacecraft Obtains Best Views of Saturn Hexagon

Dec. 4, 2013

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn's north pole.

This is the first hexagon movie of its kind, using color filters, and the first to show a complete view of the top of Saturn down to about 70 degrees latitude. Spanning about 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) across, the hexagon is a wavy jet stream of 200-mile-per-hour winds (about 322 kilometers per hour) with a massive, rotating storm at the center. There is no weather feature exactly, consistently like this anywhere else in the solar system.

"The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades -- and who knows -- maybe centuries."

Weather patterns on Earth are interrupted when they encounter friction from landforms or ice caps. Scientists suspect the stability of the hexagon has something to do with the lack of solid landforms on Saturn, which is essentially a giant ball of gas.

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Read more: http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/cassini/saturn-north-pole-hexagon-20131204.html

[JohnnyRingo]

1. K&R

I was totally unaware of this unique and extreme weather system on Saturn.
Thanx for posting this.

[WillyT]

2. K & R !!!

[AlbertCat]

3. Ahhhhh.... science!

What does it teach us? That things are way more complex and complicated than we could ever fathom. And that extraordinary things and beauty do NOT require anything supernatural to exist. Indeed, as Lawrence Krauss says: The universe is very old and very big and extraordinary and rare coincidences occur all the time. The supernatural is totally superfluous.

[2naSalit]

4. Wow!

[tclambert]

5. But WHY is it shaped like a hexagon?

Why isn't it just circular? Why not a pentagon, or a heptagon?

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

7. If you can answer that, then I suggest you write it up for your doctoral dissertation in astronomy

[DhhD]

23. Atmospheric Carbon makes it a bucky ribo planet, 6-5-6, not a diamond planet,

2-6, 2-6, 2-6, 2-6.

What fun it is to make predictions and invent words.

[trotsky]

8. Here's an article that talks about that.

http://news.discovery.com/space/a-laboratory-model-of-saturns-eerie-hexagon.htm

The Oxford researchers made a model of Saturn's North Pole. A slowly-spinning cylinder of water represented Saturn's atmosphere, and a small, rapidly-spinning ring represented a jet stream. They added some fluorescent green dye, and got a pretty well-defined hexagon.

By playing with the speed of the ring, the researchers could make nearly any shape that they wanted. The greater the difference in speed between the water and the ring, the fewer sides the polygon had. The shape seems to be bound by eddies that slowly orbit and confine the inner ring into the polygon.

Apparently, these shapes are not uncommon in fluid dynamics and can even be seen in hurricanes. This seems to be an example of a well-known phenomenon in one field being relevant to another in a completely unexpected way. But it takes a while for each community to be aware of the other one's results.

[CrispyQ]

12. Cool. Thank you!

[Thor_MN]

13. Uh oh... Previous threads on this have resulted in long running "discussions"

Where people believe that they are seeing all sorts of things in the those green dye videos with the researchers "obviously" cheating to form the patterns.

There are times where (some) people should just leave the science to the scientists...

[Peace Patriot]

15. Vast difference in size between HUGE Saturn and the tiny experiment materials...

...as well as a vast difference in the materials themselves. Does the experiment really account for how this phenomenon can be produced on such a huge scale, and with different materials, in space? I'd hesitate to say that the experiment is definitive. It's certainly interesting, though. It's the first news that I've seen about anybody coming up with a plausible explanation for this. Thanks for posting!

[trotsky]

16. Given that the same fluid behavior has been observed in hurricanes,

it would appear to scale pretty well!

On edit: this is cool: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~kossin/articles/BAMS_KosSch.pdf

[Spitfire of ATJ]

20. Nature LOVES six sided things....

Take 7 pencils and force them together and look down on them from above.

Identical diameter circles will have one in the center with six all the way around. This pattern of six repeats all the time.

[riqster]

6. That is cool. Thanks for posting!

[hunter]

9. It's a stargate. Every interesting solar system has one.

Usually advertised with prominent rings...

[BlueToTheBone]

10. What an incredible picture nt

[eppur_se_muova]

11. Does that take a Torx T-2000000000 ? nt

[Thor_MN]

14. Nicely done!!!

[tclambert]

17. I think I wrenched my funny-bone laughing at that one.

You introduced an interesting twist on the subject.

[awoke_in_2003]

19. It Torxed me off

[burrowowl]

18. Cool!!!

[raging moderate]

21. Is Saturn totally gaseous throughout?

Or is there a liquid or a tiny solid core somewhere in the center of it? I never have gotten that straight somehow?

[On the Road]

22. I Don't Know About Saturn,

but Jupiter is considered to have a core of metallic hydrogen (due to the pressure) about 2-3 times the size of earth. But that is all assumed due to modeling rather than direct observation.

[eppur_se_muova]

24. I'm betting on Bavarian Cream. nt