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Bizarre Hexagon On Saturn May Be 180 Miles Tall (space.com)
Iwastheone shares a report from Space.com: The weird hexagon swirling around Saturn's north pole is much taller than scientists had thought, a new study suggests. Researchers have generally regarded the 20,000-mile-wide (32,000 kilometers) hexagon -- a jet stream composed of air moving at about 200 mph (320 km/h) -- as a lower-atmosphere phenomenon, restricted to the clouds of Saturn's troposphere. But the bizarre structure actually extends about 180 miles (300 km) above those cloud tops, up into the stratosphere, at least during the northern spring and summer, a new study suggests. The hexagon, which surrounds a smaller circular vortex situated at the north pole, has existed for at least 38 years; NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft spotted the sharp-cornered feature when they flew by Saturn in 1980 and 1981, respectively. Scientists started to get much more detailed looks at the hexagon in 2004, when NASA's Cassini spacecraft began orbiting the ringed planet. But Cassini's hexagon observations were pretty much confined to the troposphere for a decade after its arrival; springtime didn't come to Saturn's north until 2009, and low temperatures in the stratosphere continued to compromise measurements by the probe's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) instrument for another five years.
The formation of a stratospheric hexagon appears to be tied to the warming brought on by the change of seasons, the research team wrote in the new study. Indeed, Cassini spied a vortex high above the south pole during its early years at Saturn, when that hemisphere was enjoying summer. (Saturn takes 30 Earth years to orbit the sun, so seasons on the ringed planet last about 7.5 years apiece.) But the southern stratospheric vortex wasn't hexagonal. And neither, for that matter, is the vortex that spins around the south pole lower down, in the tropospheric clouds, the researchers said. "This could mean that there's a fundamental asymmetry between Saturn's poles that we're yet to understand, or it could mean that the north polar vortex was still developing in our last observations and kept doing so after Cassini's demise," study lead author Leigh Fletcher, of the University of Leicester in England, said in a statement.
The formation of a stratospheric hexagon appears to be tied to the warming brought on by the change of seasons, the research team wrote in the new study. Indeed, Cassini spied a vortex high above the south pole during its early years at Saturn, when that hemisphere was enjoying summer. (Saturn takes 30 Earth years to orbit the sun, so seasons on the ringed planet last about 7.5 years apiece.) But the southern stratospheric vortex wasn't hexagonal. And neither, for that matter, is the vortex that spins around the south pole lower down, in the tropospheric clouds, the researchers said. "This could mean that there's a fundamental asymmetry between Saturn's poles that we're yet to understand, or it could mean that the north polar vortex was still developing in our last observations and kept doing so after Cassini's demise," study lead author Leigh Fletcher, of the University of Leicester in England, said in a statement.
Any 12 year old will know the answer to this one: "Probably Uranus".
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This is no more "dumbing down" reporting than adjusting reported times for the current timezone. Insisting on times in UTC has some merit, but isn't necessary, and is just as arbitrary as demanding SI units.
This!
As l like to point out to our friends who pop a gasket every time someone dares to mention a non-metric unit of measure, The official metre id defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 second
A freaking fraction! And tied to the freaking second!
The second, by the way, is defined as The duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. Most people shorten it to nine billion oscillations, but our Metric friends pride themselves on their accuracy and the universal logic of their system
Rather arbitrary one might think, and a rather odd thing that it's adherents find it necessary to thump their chests like Gorillas in heat.
When in fact, anyone with a bit of intelligence can seamlessly move between the two systems. I have a metric lathe and mill in my home shop, but I regularly make standard parts on it. And I can make metric parts on a standard device.
So Chill, my homies, and we can get back to much more important issues, like who would win in a fight between Captain Kirk and Captain Picard.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Queue Strauss' "Also sprach Zarathustra". Quick! Time is of the essence!