The Cellar Image of the Day

Many sites are highlighting this today, and it's been a long time since we've had a space image.

The explanation at space.com is pretty good:

Quote:

One of the most bizarre weather patterns known has been photographed at Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling the north pole.

Rather than the normally sinuous cloud structures seen on all planets that have atmospheres, this thing is a hexagon.

The honeycomb-like feature has been seen before. NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged it more than two decades ago. Now, having spotted it with the Cassini spacecraft, scientists conclude it is a long-lasting oddity.

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere, where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate, is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

Quote:

The hexagon is nearly 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it. The thermal imagery shows the hexagon extends about 60 miles (100 kilometers) down into the clouds.

I don't know what it is but I'm sure we'll find a way to blow it up or exploit it's natural resources.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sundae Girl

Argh! Wish I hadn't read that bit - it's a whole swirl of skulls to me now.

Last time I saw swirling skulls like that was after I'd sampled some interesting fungi

Quote:

The researchers found that once the plate was spinning so fast that the water span out to the sides, creating a hole of air in the middle, the dry patch wasn't circular as might be expected. Instead it evolved, as the bucket's spin sped up, from an ellipse to a three-sided star, to a square, a pentagon, and, at the highest speeds investigated, a hexagon.

...

Similar polygonal shapes have been reported in gigantic, vortex-like flows in the atmosphere of our planet and others, as well as in the eye of a hurricane. And an immense, hexagonal-shaped vortex was spotted by the Voyager spacecraft at the northern pole of the gas-giant planet Saturn.

The skull I see is a cartoonish sort of skull making an "ooooo" sort of face; it's also a bit monkey-like. It's at about the 225 of a compass.

So thats where they moved the Thunderdome to !!!

Oh and I see skulls , and distorted faces ALL around the Hex ,
Could this be the tourtured soals that perrished in the Feared ThunderDome ????

What do you call a mushroom that takes you out and feeds you drinks?...... A fungi to be with.

Give me a wrench long enough and a lugnut on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Didn't anyone see 2010? That's a big STOP sign...someone doesn't want us exploring any further out.

My theory is that it is not a hexagon but instead a static sine wave of 6 wave lengths. We see it as a hexagon because it is mapped on a circle. I created this image using the polar coordinates filter in photoshop Attachment 12224

Well, this was an interesting conversation, until Slight got all serious and fucked it up...

(Seriously...that's awesome...I never would have thought of that. Of course, I hated trig.)

So what causes a 60 mile high sine wave around the pole? Does it extend to, or close to, the surface? Is the cloud mass greater, closer to the pole, causing a sine wave where the boundary lies?

That's the trouble with space, or science in general, every time you come up with a good answer, it just creates more questions.

It's not a sine wave. It's the result of the viscous fluid (the atmosphere) lagging behind the spinning container (the planet)*. The shape is a ... mathematical coincidence. Rather, our perception of some meaningful pattern is the coincidence. The shape is just the math and physics.

* Or just lagging compared to the parts of the atmosphere that are spinning at different rates. Similar phenomena have been observed in the eyes of terrestrial hurricanes. I provided a good link above.

edit: No, I haven't recently returned from a vacation on Saturn, Uranus (or anyone else's for that matter... ha ha)

But a sine wave is nothing but a shape too, really... it doesn't imply a specific medium or source or anything like that.

Is that why it's so big? I have 4 and 5 and 5.5 and gave 'em up for elements, because I'm to dumb to use all the stuff in the full size versions. Hell, I've been using elements for a couple years and just discovered it has talk bubbles. Duh

The movie clip shows the inside and out side of the hex rotating at the same relative speed.

I think it's a polar jet stream. The earth's northern hemisphere jet stream often falls into stable 4-wave and 5-wave patterns lasting several weeks, 4-wave most common in summer and 5-wave in winter. My meteorology professor said that six and seven wave patterns happened but were very unstable. I guess a six wave pattern on Saturn is very stable.

Does the Earth's northern hemisphere jet stream also have skulls in it? Like around Iceland?

Fascinating. The sciencey stuff kind of lost me....I never could get my head around trig. I mean....doing some of the equations with a log book as per high school exercises I could just about manage, but I could never visualise what it was I was doing. I just followed the formula I'd been given. It was, and is, meaningless to me as applied to the real world.

I saw this Science article on /. that shows how to recreate this 6 wave pattern in the lab. I found this quote from the article quite telling about the fact that other people like @juggle5 have seen this stuff before: