Weird Saturn hexagon covered in ‘sandwich-like’ haze
But we don’t know what its filling is.
There’s an extensive system of haze layers in the bizarre hexagon on Saturn, a new study has found. ‘Saturn’s hexagon’ is a swirling maelstrom at the planet’s north pole that, as its name implies, has an odd, hexagonal shape. The hexagon is an ever-present cloud pattern that ‘stands’ as tall as an enormous, whirling tower on the planet. The phenomenon was first discovered in 1980 by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft and was later imaged in exquisite detail by the Cassini spacecraft, which orbited the planet from 2004 to 2017.
Now in a new study, scientists with the Planetary Science Group at the University of the Basque Country used images from Cassini and the Hubble Space Telescope to show that Saturn’s hexagon is more than just a geometric oddity. The feature has its own system of hazes layered on top of one another.
In 2015 Cassini’s main camera snapped high-resolution images of Saturn that revealed the hazes above the clouds in the hexagon. 15 days later the Hubble Space Telescope also took a look at the planet and its strange hexagon. Using these images the team was able to understand more about the layers of hexagon hazes spotted by Cassini.
“The Cassini images have enabled us to discover that, just as if a sandwich had been formed, the hexagon has a multilayered system of at least seven mists that extend from the summit of its clouds to an altitude of more than 300 kilometres above them,” said Agustín SánchezLavega, who led the study.
The researchers discovered that each of these haze layers is approximately between 7 and 18 kilometres thick. The team thinks that because of the drastic freezing temperatures in Saturn’s atmosphere – which range from minus 120 degrees to minus 180 degrees Celsius – there are likely frozen crystalline particles made up of butane, acetylene or even propane in the cloud structure.
While Saturn’s hexagon feature is still not completely understood, by understanding phenomena like Saturn’s hexagon better, researchers hope to better understand not only this strange cloud pattern on Saturn, but also atmospheric phenomena that happen here on our home planet.
CHELSEA GOHD