Data suggests Saturn's gigantic hexagon might reach hundreds of kilometers high

Scientists are pouring through the data that the Cassini Saturn mission provided on the ringed planet and its atmospheric conditions. Back in 2004 Cassini originally found that the southern hemisphere was in summer and a broad, warm, high-altitude vortex was spinning in the southern pole with no similar conditions existing in the colder, wintertime, northern pole.

Now that the seasons on Saturn are starting to change the Cassini data suggests that a similar vortex is starting to form near the northern pole. Scientists note that this particular vortex sits hundreds of kilometers above the clouds in the stratosphere of the planet. A surprise finding for the scientists was that the edges of this new Vortex appear to be hexagonal matching the pattern seen deeper in the atmosphere.

Scientists expected a vortex to form at the northern pole as it warmed, but the shape of the vortex was a surprise. The team says that either two hexagon vortex weather patterns formed spontaneously and identically, or the hexagonal vortex is massive and towers vertically for several hundred kilometers. Most of the weather on Saturn is in the cloud levels of the planet. The north polar hexagon has been studied for decades.

That pattern was thought to be akin to the Polar Jet Stream here on Earth. The new data comes thanks to Cassini finally begin able to study the northern pole in infrared light. That portion of the planet was originally too cold for IR studies, but the summer warming trend has made IR possible.

Data suggests that the two poles of Saturn behave very differently. This leads to two possibilities, one is that there is a fundamental asymmetry in the poles of Saturn science doesn't yet understand. The other is that the north polar vortex was still developing in the last observations and continued to develop after Cassini died in 2017. Researchers will continue to investigate this phenomenon and believe that it is unlikely that a single massive tower-like vortex can exist due to wind conditions that change with altitude.

SOURCE: ESA