I love physics, but sadly mathematics is not one of my strong suits. So I challenged myself this week to read a space paper. Outer space is beyond cool, but getting through some of the literature out there about relevant findings can be tough. But fear not! For now, I will- to the best of my abilities- summarize one of the coolest space papers I’ve ever attempted to read: and it’s all about Saturn’s biannual storms and the interesting shapes they create!
For starters, did anyone know Saturn has a hexagon that permanently lives at its North pole? I definitely didn’t! In school you learn about Jupiters “Big Red Storm” and about Saturns rings and that Venus is super hot, and that’s about it. But Saturns a way cooler planet than just a gas monster with some rings around it. Saturn has this hexagon-shaped thing up at it’s North pole, and it changes color depending on the time of year! Summer solstice turns the blue-ash green hue of the hexagon to a murky yellow-clay color. This shift has to do with chemical reactions that happen in the atmosphere of the planet upon exposure to the sun’s UV light rays! Makes so much sense, but I never would have guessed.
So the paper was about this hexagon, and some storms. The storms were referred to as vortices in the paper, and if frequently been spotted during the middle of summer for the southern hemisphere. They were warm, broad vortices that occurred in the stratosphere of the planets, a little ways above the atmosphere. It was odd to scientists that, while these were frequent for the southern hemisphere in the midst of summer, none were spotted in the northern hemisphere upon during its summertime. Upon a little further observation, though, vortices were observed near the north pole as the north pole experienced a change in seasons, from winter to summer.
But the oddities didn’t stop. They observed storms in the northern hemisphere, which they more or less expected since they had already seen them in the south. But now that the vortices were in the north…they were hexagonal. They had six, even-looking sides, similar to the way Saturn’s famous hexagon looked from Earth! This was something they had never seen before, and while the data isn’t quite interpretable yet, this is an exciting finding for Saturn scientists!
Some of the lead scientists on this study were a little disappointed that they didn’t get to do any deep-studies on these funny hexagonal storms before the probe they sent to Saturn (called Cassini) was demolished. However, from this science writers’ perspective, this is insanely cool! There’s so many new questions to be answered just from this discovery, like why these vortices look different in the north and south, where the hexagonal shape comes from, or if there are similar color shifts in these vortices like the North pole hexagon. The possibilities stemming from this shape-spotting is nearly endless!
You might say it was one small storm for Saturn, but one giant surprise to science!
Original paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06017-3
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