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Cassini Gets Amazing Views of Saturn's Hexagon
SternisheFan sends this excerpt from a JPL news release:
"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 (GIF), 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.'"
...to say the .gif is mesmerizing, and I have no clue what I'm looking at.
If you later said, "Lol, that's a false color prostate exam camera," I wouldn't be shocked.
You really did some cool shit. Please get back to that agenda
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
Why isn't it a spiral; why do the winds run roughly straight, then make a sharp turn and then run roughly straight again? I am not an astro-physicist, hell I don't even know if that's the correct term. But if someone out there knows why the peculiar shape I'd be most intrigued to find out.
The GIF begs the question, why, i.e., what causes the hexagonal pattern, but there's nothing in TFA that explains it. Can any of you astronomer types shed light on this???
My coffee milk frother does this. It's not that unique.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
One of the strangest things about the hexagon is that other gas giants don't see to have anything like it. And it rotates with the same period as Saturn's natural radio emissions, which is not the period of rotation of Saturn itself. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/247/4947/1206. Also, relevant SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1930.
This would've gotten a lot more views had it said, "Cassini Gets Amazing Views of Saturn's Box"
No, it’s just that God prefers Allen wrenches.
The Hexagon of Saturn is nothing compared with the Delta of Venus
I want some pics of that.
Am I only one who think that Saturn has too perfect circle shape in this image.
Also I think that Saturn hexagon actually consists of 7 smaller hurricanes.
.O.O
O.O.O
.O.O
Metric or standard??
metric IS the standard.
Metric or standard??
Neither is the one true unit type. Nobody has gotten it right yet.
No, it’s just that God prefers Allen wrenches.
That explains why celestial mechanics is so wacky.
Ezekiel 23:20
Not to be too negative, but the "movie" consists of 8 frames. Don't bust out the popcorn just yet. Nevertheless, it's an interesting show.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
...that's an A-T field!
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I just measure things by comparing them to a few trusty old plancks.
I predict that Saturn has clear skies under the clouds. The .gif image of 8 frames gives some support for my expectation. The rocky core is seen in the .gif and that core has clear gas all the way to the polar hole in the cloud tops. Venus has clear skies under thick clouds. Mars has clear skies under clouds. Earth has clear air under clouds. Saturn is expected also to conform to that, so I predict the cloud tops of Saturn are over a thick layer of transparent atmosphere over a rocky core that is seen in the .gif movies center.
...the smaller storm system @ the 5:25 position? It appears to rotating opposite to the central system.
Interesting.
Reminds me of the head of a bolt. Do you suppose Saturn is metric or standard?
In all seriousness, I think it's both weird yet fascinating that the clouds have formed such a (nearly) perfect shape. It almost looks like the boundary wanted to develop into a sort of "sine wave" but other influences flattened portions of it out.
A mole of plancks would be a usable universal length; just exactly how long that is is another question. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
http://www.universetoday.com/15322/
Saturn has the lowest density of all the planets in the Solar System. The actual number is 0.687 grams per cubic centimeter. This is actually less dense than water; if you had a large enough pool of water, Saturn would float.
Just for comparison, Jupiter has an average density of 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter. So it wouldn’t float on water. And Earth, the densest planet in the Solar System, measures 5.51 grams/cubic centimeter.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
However, the mole itself is an arbitrary number, not a "deep universal" constant: the number of Carbon-12 atoms in 12 grams of Carbon-12. This depends on the arbitrary "gram" unit, which is no more "universal" than anything else.
Not only is it not universal, it will also still be really small. About 9 nanometres.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
The thought of a planetary-scale standing wave just boggles my mind.
From today even:
https://xkcd.com/1301/
I bet this one will be useful in MANY situations.