A giant hexagon circling Saturn’s north pole has puzzled scientists for decades. Now researchers have managed to recreate the pattern in the lab using little more than water and a spinning table, Science Now reports.
The Saturn hexagon seems to represent the strange rigid path of a jet stream, with each of the six sides being one Earth diameter in length. NASA’s Voyager spacecraft first spotted it in the early 1980s, and the Cassini spacecraft has followed up with more visible-light and infrared images.
Physicists at the University of Oxford set out to recreate the Saturn pattern by placing a 30-liter cylinder of water — almost 8 gallons — on a slowly spinning table. They also placed a small ring inside the water tank that whirled more rapidly than the cylinder and created a miniature lab version of the jet stream.
The experiment suggests that Saturn’s north polar jet stream spins at a certain rate compared to the rest of the planet’s atmosphere which favors the hexagon pattern. Similar phenomena have shown up in the centers of hurricanes.
A full report appears in this month’s issue of the journal Icarus. — Jeremy Hsu
[via Science Now]
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