The Lost Eyeball

Hexagonal Storm on Saturn

It’s pretty weird that our robot-dude on Saturn, Cassini, recently photographed a hexagonal shaped weather-pattern on Saturn.  But what is even weirder is that this phenomenon was imaged a full 26 years ago, meaning that this isn’t just an passing fad.  Somehow the dynamics of the storm in that area are such that it creates and maintains angles such as this.  How, is somewhat of a mystery still, but this news@nature article may provide some insight.

Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby have created similar geometric shapes (holes in the form of stars, squares, pentagons and hexagons) in whirlpools of water in a cylindrical bucket1. The shapes appear easily enough once the bucket is spinning at a rate of one to seven revolutions per second, they say.

More on the storm here and here