And the goofballs think that shadows on Mars have to be a Face.
What will the Prozac crew think of this?!
Or this. You never know.
How come Saturn gets the cool-shaped storms and we don’t? genuinely curious; any physicists?
Obviously it’s the hex nut that holds the axis about which Saturn revolves. Now, I’m trying to picture the celestial wrench that’s needed to torque it down.
Eh? What’s that? Celestial wench? See link in previous post.
Saturn is just another word for Satan. Six is the evil number; the egg is hatching - it’s a six-sided crack - and the beast is about to emerge to devour the sky.
IANA anything, but it’s made of very dense gas, so acts akin to a liquid - see “geometric whirlpools” thingummy.
And now we know what God uses to exfoliate with in the bathtub!
Sorry. Must be my Mid-West accent. I said WRENCH. Spanner to our friends on the other side of the Atlantic and/or any Angliophiles.
That said, I like your idea better.
Glad to be of service, Kyth. Saturn (and Jupiter, and Venus, and Neptune, for that matter) have, as jjimm said, dense atmospheres. But it’s a bit more than that: they also have a varied composition. Ours is nitrogen and oxygen: boring. Those other planets have high densities of things like hydrogen, helium, carbon dioxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide. That’s where the action is, and that’s what results in complicated, self-sustaining, Earth-sized storms.
(Physics grad student, for the record.)
Is there any record, of storms such as that, here? It’s an incredibly interesting phenomenon. After reading the above mentioned article about the experiments with buckets of water I wonder if the effect is caused by a combination of speed and pressure? IANAP by any stretch so it’s all speculation on my part.
Don’t touch it. If you loosen it too much, Jupiter falls into the lobby.
Nice. The name of the crater on that moon is Herschel.
“Oh, I’m afraid that Herschel will be quite operational when your friends arrive.”
You got me. I’m a physics grad student, not a meteorologist, so my knowledge on the subject is limited to what I posted above.
Can I just add that it really irritates me that all the stories I’ve heard about this – and the news story on the NASA site, fer pete’s sake – keep referring to it as a six-sided hexagon? WTF? Is this to differentiate it from the illusive four-sided or nine-sided hexagon?
Maybe they’re as mechanically inept as me. Many’s the time I’ve rounded off a nut and created 6 sided octagons.
It’s not the kind of thing people keep in the front (or crammed in the middle or back, for that matter) of their minds. Have you seen that show about being smarter than a 5th grader?
Seriously, lighten up.
Why shouldn’t Saturn have a hexagon anyway? It’s the sixth planet. Maybe it’s just symbolic.
Update on the cause of the Hexagon: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070408
Jim