TORONTO – It’s a puzzle that has fascinated astronomers since the 1980s.
A powerful jet-stream at Saturn’s north pole has been churning for years — in the shape of a hexagon.
“The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades — and who knows — maybe centuries.”
The Cassini spacecraft obtained the high-resolution images due to the position of the sun relative to Saturn.
In late 2012, the sun began to illuminate the interior, allowing scientists to examine the motion of the clouds within the system.
READ MORE: Saturn’s Cassini mission continues to provide stunning images
The hexagonal storm — that measures 25,000 km across — was first imaged by the Voyager flybys of the 1980s. The estimated winds of the storm whip around the pole near 354 km/h.
There is no other storm like it in the solar system.
“Inside the hexagon, there are fewer large haze particles and a concentration of small haze particles, while outside the hexagon, the opposite is true,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia. “The hexagonal jet stream is acting like a barrier, which results in something like Earth’s Antarctic ozone hole.”
Scientists hope to take more photos of the hexagon during Saturn’s summer solstice in 2017 when lighting conditions over the north pole improve even more.
Cassini launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in July 2004.
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