Saturn's North Pole Hexagon Mystery Solved?

Analysis by Nicole Gugliucci | Thu Apr 15, 2010 01:02 AM ET

I'll admit, I did an incredulous double-take when I first saw the pictures of the hexagon at Saturn's north pole. We don't see too many regular polygons in astronomy. Such a sight makes me think of Ellie Arroway's (played by Jody Foster) ominous line in the movie Contact upon seeing the geometric patterns of light on a distant planet: "They're alive."

The hexagon was first detected by the Voyager missions in the 1980s. Infrared mapping of the strange shape by Cassini in 2006 showed that it had indeed survived for at least 25 years.

In 2006, Cassini confirmed the Voyager Program's observations of Saturn's hexagon, what did scientists make of it at the time? (NASA)
A regular, pointy shape is indeed a natural phenomenon in this case. Physicists at the University of Oxford have even recreated it in the lab with a model of Saturn's north pole. A slowly-spinning cylinder of water represented Saturn's atmosphere, and a small, rapidly-spinning ring represented a jet stream. Add some fluorescent green dye, and you get a pretty well-defined hexagon.

By playing with the speed of the ring, the researchers could make nearly any shape that they wanted. The greater the difference in speed between the water and the ring, the fewer sides the polygon had. The shape seems to be bound by eddies that slowly orbit and confine the inner ring into the polygon.

more

http://news.discovery.com/space/saturns-north-pole-hexagon-mystery-solved.html

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/04/saturns-strange-hexagon-recreate.html

thanks!

BTW, a hexagon is common shape in nature since it is the most efficient use of space... eg. cells in honeycomb.

I note that 'pointy' is indeed the intersection of 2 different radii - an interference pattern if you will (though it's actually eddy currents creating the smaller radii.)

"User Friendly" solved that ages ago -- see:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x29276

Tesha