Saturn is Home for Two Freaky Storms

Astronomers have spotted another strange weather pattern on Saturn. This huge feature is circling the north pole and has six distinctive sides. It is notable because cloud formations previously viewed on this and other planets are usually wavy or winding cloud structures.

Although this feature, bearing the shape of a honeycomb has been seen before by NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts that took pictures of it more than two decades ago. Now that the Cassini spacecraft has also spotted it, scientists are reading to consider it a long lasting oddity.

Kevin Baines, the atmospheric expert and also a member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, California was interviewed about the finding. "We've never seen anything like this in any other planet. It is indeed very strange, and lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Baines.

Baines also expressed surprise, "Saturn's thick atmosphere with circularly shaped waves and convective cells dominating is perhaps the last place that you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, but there it is, in living color."

In real time size the hexagon is nearly 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) across. It is estimated that nearly four Earths could fit inside it. Thermal imaging shows that the hexagon extends for about 60 miles (100 kilometers) down into the clouds.

Saturn is no stranger to odd occurrences, at its south pole, Cassini recently spotted a freaky hurricane feature that resembles a human eye, and the storm is two-thirds the diameter of earth. It stretches 5,000 miles wide (8,000 kilometers) and is very different from an earth hurricane because the clouds ringing it are five times taller that hurricane clouds on earth. This storm system also appears to be locked into place.

Bob Brown the team leader of the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer for Cassini, located at the University of Arizona says, "It's amazing to find such diametrically different occurrences at opposite poles of the planet.

Since being glimpsed 26 years ago by Voyager, the hexagon appears to have remained fixed with Saturn's rotation rate and axis. But the length of a Saturn day is still a mystery, so no one is sure about the planet's actual rotation rate.

Baines said that he was hoping to understand the hexagon's dynamic nature and thus discover the true rotation rate of the deep atmosphere and interior.

Sources:
Strange Hexagon Seen On Saturn by AOL.com
Bizarre Hexagon Spotted on Saturn by Space.com Staff
Freak One-Eyed Monster Storm Spotted On Saturn by Robert Roy Britt Space.com