The latest hot news from the Jet Propulsion Lab is about a hexagon spotted on Saturn’s North Pole, big enough to fill it with four Earth-sized planets.
An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA’s Cassini mission.
NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged the feature over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.
“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”
The hexagon is similar to Earth’s polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region. On Saturn, the vortex has a hexagonal rather than circular shape. The hexagon is nearly 25,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it.
While folks at NASA and JPL are still debating what the hexagon represents, I’m sure hordes of people who have a thing for “long-lost civilizations” are now beating their drums, in much the same way the “face on Mars” got us all excited about extraterrestrial life until higher resolution images became available. But for now, nobody knows for sure; I’d like to think it’s some long-abandoned Saturnian government building, but unless Cassini sends back true-color photos, everyone can just wildly speculate.
Update: It turns out, things that are spinning so fast make different shapes, as seen in my other hype-deflating post (this post is currently climbing up Reddit’s charts). So Saturn’s hexagon may just be a product of extremely powerful centrifugal forces. No “alien government building” there.
Tags: Adamson+University, Adamsonian, NASA, Saturn, Mars
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