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Cassini Probes the Hexagon On Saturn
Riding with Robots sends us to a NASA page with photos of a little-understood hexagonal shape surrounding Saturn's north pole. "This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet." This structure was discovered by the Voyager probes over 20 years ago (here's an 18-year-old note on the mystery). The fact that it's still in place means it is stable and long-lived. Scientists have no idea what causes the hexagon. It's nearly big enough to fit four earths inside — comfortably larger than Jupiter's Great Red Spot. The article has an animation of clouds moving within the hexagon captured in infrared light.
Here's one: http://www.physorg.com/news66924222.html
Typing "spinning water hexagon Slashdot" into Google turned up this article
E pluribus unum
Wasn't there a story here within the last six months or so about spinning a bucket of water at the right speed and having it form geometric forms, including a hexagon?
5 -17.html
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060515/full/06051
Posted AC so as not to be accused of being a karma whore.
Maybe the solid core is acting like the agitator? Perhaps there are rougher features at the northern pole than there are at the southern, explaining why there is no southern hexagon. The article says the hexagon rotates at the same speed as radio emissions from Saturn, which they assume is the same speed as the core rotates.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
> This hexagonal structure was BUILT by intelligent life.
Did you read the article? It's not a stationary solid structure. It's a long-term atmospheric feature, like Jupiter's great red spot, only shaped like a hexagon.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You mean, specifically, "Swinney, meanwhile, thinks that the process is unlikely to apply to large-scale flows such as that on Saturn, but might be relevant to smaller-scale phenomena such as tornadoes."
Original article
One wonders if this is similar to what is occasionally seen in hurricanes: polygonal eyes. (If interested, do a Google search on "polygonal eyewalls" and get a pretty nice synopsis of the literature on the topic.) It isn't terribly out of the range of possibility that simple theories like these may be enough to explain a lot of this phenomenon. And, yes, polygonal eyewalls in real hurricanes can be very persistent, if the vortex itself doesn't change much and proper balances are maintained. On a planet like Saturn, I would imagine that things don't change too much even from year to year, so the whole pattern could persist for decades if unperturbed.
--Jellisky
I think Godel proved it doesn't have a code.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.