Researchers have created a breathtaking video of the unique six-sided jet stream located near Saturn's North Pole.
The first-of-its-kind movie uses color filters and displays a complete view of the top of Saturn, a NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory news release reported.
The video shows a wavy jet stream that moves 200 miles per hour and has an ominous storm in the middle. The jet stream is enormous, spanning at least 20,000 miles. This is the only weather feature like this that has been observed anywhere in the universe.
"The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable," Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said. "A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades -- and who knows -- maybe centuries."
Weather events on Earth are usually stopped by friction caused by landforms or ice caps, but since Saturn is made of gas there is nothing to slow down the jet stream.
"Inside the hexagon, there are fewer large haze particles and a concentration of small haze particles, while outside the hexagon, the opposite is true," Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia, said. "The hexagonal jet stream is acting like a barrier, which results in something like Earth's Antarctic ozone hole."
The researchers were able to get a better view of the spectacular weather event because the Sun started illuminating the interior of the hexagon due to the planet's position.
"As we approach Saturn's summer solstice in 2017, lighting conditions over its north pole will improve, and we are excited to track the changes that occur both inside and outside the hexagon boundary," Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.
