Saturn Hexagon mystery

Saturn Hexagon Mystifies Scientists

Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News




March 27, 2007 — Something downright weird has been sighted twirling over the north pole of Saturn: A long-lived double hexagon formed in the clouds.
The two six-sided features — one inside the other — are in stark contrast to the hurricane-like vortex that has been observed at the ringed planet's south pole. Both poles have been imaged by NASA's orbiting Cassini spacecraft.
"We haven't seen a (geometric) feature like this anywhere else on any other planet," said Cassini scientist Kevin Baines of the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's unbelievable."



One of the unexplained hexagons was glimpsed obliquely before, by the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts more than 20 years ago, which is how scientists know it's a durable feature. Cassini's infrared mapping instrument has provided the first whole, irrefutable images of the feature from a higher-latitude orbit.
The 15,000-mile-wide feature appears to be some sort of deep-seated standing wave, through which other things move without changing the wave pattern, Baines observed. It also appears to be in sync with the planet's quick 10-and-a-half-hour rotation.
Beyond that, nobody is sure what to make of it.
"It's perplexing," said Baines. "It's a bizarre pattern."
Cassini's recent fly over Saturn's southern hemisphere gave scientists a chance to verify that no such feature appears there. Instead there was a mega-hurricane-like vortex with a broad, deep eye over the south pole, explained Cassini team member Bob Brown of the University of Arizona.

Bizarre Hexagon Spotted on Saturn
By SPACE.com Staff

One of the most bizarre weather patterns known has been photographed at Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling the north pole.
Rather than the normally sinuous cloud structures seen on all planets that have atmospheres, this thing is a hexagon.
The honeycomb-like feature has been seen before. NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged it more than two decades ago. Now, having spotted it with the Cassini spacecraft, scientists conclude it is a long-lasting oddity.
"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 nearly 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it. The thermal imagery shows the hexagon extends about 60 miles (100 kilometers) down into the clouds.
At Saturn's south pole, Cassini recently spotted a freaky human eye-like feature that resembles a hurricane.
"It's amazing to see such striking differences on opposite ends of Saturn's poles," said Bob Brown, team leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer at the University of Arizona. "At the south pole we have what appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye, and at the north pole of Saturn we have this geometric feature, which is completely different."
The hexagon appears to have remained fixed with Saturn's rotation rate and axis since first glimpsed by Voyager 26 years ago. The actual rotation rate of Saturn is still uncertain, which means nobody knows exactly how long the planet's day is.
"Once we understand its dynamical nature, this long-lived, deep-seated polar hexagon may give us a clue to the true rotation rate of the deep atmosphere and perhaps the interior," Baines said. [/size]

Awesome. I wonder how that happened, though. I mean, seriously: HOW?

From what I have read at NASA, they don't have a clue. They can't explain it.



Some other sites, most of them weirdo dudes, like that one NASA guy that left the agency and now does a website on kooky stuff, like the Cydonia area with it's "face" and "pyramids", thinks it's some quantam multi-universe thing. I think it was something about a paralell universe and the gravity and magnetism it puts on our universe. But it's been awhile since I read it.


But those clouds are holding up against several hundred mile an hour winds, they hold there form. They are just clouds themselves, but for clouds to hold shape like that, something major is going on.

I'm thinking it's some form of super gravity from the rotation of the planet, that there is some solid core near the center of saturn, maybe a diamond like I have read in a book once, a diamond the size of a small moon, and it rotates and make some kind of gravity wave, or magnetic wave or some rot, and it forms the moving clouds into the two hexagon shapes.

Why it make hexagons at the top, and a hurricane like eye at the bottom, I got no clue. But it's something to do with rotation and gravity. I don't know why magnetism would have anything to do with it, cause those gases are like amonia clouds, I don't know that they have any metal in them.

My guess at this time, and it's just me, nothing I'v heard, but that meteors hitting that planet must vaporise some of the metals, and they are small enough to mingle in with the gases, and they form some sort of metallic cloud at the top, influenced by magnetic rotation fields.

Ha ha, but I'm sure that's easily debunked by the more educated, I don't know much about magnetic fields or what metal does in Saturn's soup of gas.