Just a few months after the Cassini spacecraft imaged an eyeball-shaped storm at Saturn's south pole, the orbiter has captured new images of this bizarre hexagon-shaped weather pattern at the north pole. It's approximately 15,000 miles across and has held its shape since astronomers first discovered it 26 years ago via the Voyager space probe.
From Space.com:
"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."
Link to Space.com, Link to more images and movie at NASA.gov
UPDATE: Thanks to all the readers who pointed me to this relevant News@Nature article about geometric whirlpools Link
