Cassini Probes the Hexagon On Saturn 280
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.
"My God, it's full of stars." (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:/. story about spinning water? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:/. story about spinning water? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:/. story about spinning water? (Score:2, Interesting)
Interplanetary Spirograph (Score:1, Interesting)
It's a Dissipative Structure (Score:5, Interesting)
In the experiment that was being described, a small dish of water was heated up uniformly from below. At a certain point, these hexagonal structures emerged. Hot water would rise from the bottom of the dish, travelling in a pipe directly through the middle of the hexagon ( forming a point in the middle that you could see ). When the water hit the surface, it spread out cooled, and then travelled back down to the bottom, creating the sides of the hexagon. Apparently they were getting multiple hexagons, and they were incredibly stable
Re:it must be bees (Score:2, Interesting)
(SPI?!? see http://www.costik.com/spisins.html [costik.com] )
Looks like a Benard cell? (Score:3, Interesting)
One reason why we should explore space... (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine the scientific excitement if you were aboard a vessel like the Galaxy Class USS Enterprise from Star Trek (NCC 1701 D), approaching Saturn and seeing live the phenomenon, then staying there for a while to study it and comprehend it!
Exploration of space is the most important goal for humankind. Earth provides a very limited experience, and in a few 100 years it will be totally explored. If we want to understand the universe, space is the final frontier.