Saturn's Hexagonal Flow -- Science News Repost

Saturn’s six-sided cloud pattern gets a close look

by Ashley Yeager

5:16pm, December 6, 2013   

SUPER SWIRL  A sharp boundary defines the six-sided cloud pattern that spans about 30,000 kilometers across Saturn’s north pole, as seen in this new false-color image from the Cassini spacecraft.  Hampton, SSI, JPL-Caltech/NASA   

Saturn’s strange six-sided cloud pattern has gotten its day in the sun.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft snapped the highest-resolution images to date of the planet’s hexagonal jet stream, which fuels swirling, cloudy storms at the planet’s north pole. Because of recent changes in Saturn’s tilt that allowed the sun to shine on the region, astronomers were able to get a better view and understanding of the roughly 30,000-kilometer-wide cloud structure.
Using colored filters, the Cassini team identified large particles, shown in pink, swirling in the planet’s lower atmosphere. Large particles at higher altitudes appear green, and tiny particles higher in the atmosphere appear blue. Those tiny particles define the sharp boundary of the hexagonal jet stream.
While the geometric shape of Saturn’s jet stream seems odd, its existence is not. Earth’s jet stream also forms cloud swirls around the North Pole. However, “Earth is basically really messy,” said Cassini team member Kunio Sayanagi of Hampton University in Virginia during a Google Hangout by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on December 4.
Air currents on Earth jumble up clouds by blowing over continents, mountains and oceans. But gaseous Saturn is free of solid ground, so the six-sided cloud structure persists and has probably been there for decades, possibly centuries.

Citations

Jet Propulsion Laboratory News. NASA's Cassini Spacecraft Obtains Best Views of Saturn Hexagon. Published online December 4, 2013.

Further Reading

A. Grant. Cassini photo puts Earth in perspective. Science News. Vol. 184, August 24, 2013, p. 8.



Star-shaped gravity waves

I knew the top photo reminded me of something. It's these star-shaped gravity waves that were produced at the micro-level. Here is another example of a very small gravity phenomenon behaving like a very large gravity phenomenon. They can both be seen as examples of toroidal flow at different scales. These gravity waves were produced in circular containers that constrained their outer edges. The pole and the geometric forms arose spontaneously during a micro-shaking experiment.

Bell pepper displays same hexagonal shape around its north pole
as the hexagon that surrounds Saturn's North Pole.

Take a look at this bell pepper I was using at breakfast this morning. The petals around its north pole are hexagonal like Saturn's North Pole. Isn't that funny? It has something to do with toroidal shapes. I've often used pictures of fruits and vegetables to illustrate tori in nature. Perhaps this hexagonal shape is a fundamental shape thrown off by the toroidal flow.

NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of Crab Nebula, 2013

Now take a look at the Crab Nebula. Do you see the bright pink hexagonal ring? I've highlighted the lines I'm talking about in the picture below.

The distribution of stars in the along the pink zones looks like the same pattern of the straight-sided hexagon surrounding a pole, as is the green part of the pepper, and the hexagonal pattern around the North Pole of Saturn. Not only that, but you can see that its outside bubble-shaped clouds resembles the bulging walls of the bell pepper as well as the bubbles lying outside the hexagonal shape in the gravity wave in the upper picture.

I'm suggesting that the reason these patterns repeat far and wide is that they are basic toroidal flow dynamics. Their presence implies the torus pattern underlying their assemblages.