What is the hexagon on saturn?

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Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, if aliens arrived to our solar system, do you think they would know that we were here on Earth before they landed? Like, could they tell from far away? Well, I don't know. You think they're broadcasting episodes of our podcast. Maybe they'd hear one. I'm not sure they would conclude that we're that intelligent if they got this podcast, but well, they'd hear that we love asking questions. I don't know. I guess if they know they can't close enough to Earth to see the surface but not see people, they could probably see all sorts of weird geometric structures, you know, circles from farming and cities and grids and stuff that you just don't see in nature, like straight lines and squares and perfect circles. Yeah, the kind of stuff you don't see like coming naturally out of a forest or some totally wild environment, like like a holiday in from above exactly, Well, you don't see spontaneous holiday inns farming in jungles. Right. Hi. I'm Morey. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics. And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I like asking questions about the universe. Wondering about weird stuff and planning to collaborate with other species against the for the downfall of humanity. And that's perfect because I like drawing aliens and question marks. That's right. That's why we make such a great team. Exactly. I commit the crimes and you draw them, but I make them funny and with sound effects. That's right. At my trial for treason against humanity, I want you to be the sort of court reporter that's drawing me sympathetically. Oh yeah, I'll be there. I'll be drawing the mental map of your guilty argumentation. But before that, you can see a sample of our work because we wrote a book together about questions about the universe. It's called We Have No Idea, A Guide to the Unknown Universe. Yeah. It's full of awesome, interesting questions about the universe and also cartoons, so check it out. That's right. But today you're listening to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio. That's right, And here's where we sit down and chew on one particular question. Every episode, we try to find something weird, something strange, something that you'd like to hear discussed in more depth than you can just google and break it down for you. Yeah, all kinds of weird things out there in the universe and other planets in the smallest of scales, things that are circular, square, spinning, maybe even hexagonal. That's right. We like all kinds of questions, two sided, four sided, even six sided questions. So today on the podcast, we'll be talking about a pretty interesting mystery right here in our solar system. I think even pretty interesting is under selling it. I think it's flabbergasting. When I first heard about this, I thought, whoa, that's probably aliens. You were flabbergasted, That's right. All of my flabbers were totally gasted by this concept. I don't even know what that means, but it sounds like you're amazed. I don't know. I'm trying to reduce the number of flappers I have, actually, um as I get older. But yeah, this is the kind of thing that it's sort of a modern question because it's the kind of question that arises. Um. The more we can see things, you know, the more we look out into the universe, the more we see stuff that we didn't expect, which is exactly why we do look out into the universe to get those surprises. Yeah, to get more data points about how the universe works, right, because so far we can only mostly look around where we are here on Earth. That's right. And I think early humans thought, hey, look, this is the Earth, this is the universe. Everything else is just details or supporting cast right. And as we learn more and more about our role in the universe, we learned that the universe is huge. And but you might be tempted to do extrapolate and said, well, maybe the rest of the universe is just filled with Earth's also, right. But the more we look out, the more we learn that the Earth is weird, it's strange, it's it's unusual. There are just in our Solar system. There are no other plan It's like the Earth. Yeah, it's strangely not hexagonal. That's right. That's right. So maybe you should stop teasing folks and tell them exactly what we're talking about today. Yeah, So to be on the program, we'll be talking a really big mystery in our solar system. We'll be talking about what is Saturn's hexagon? That's right. And you might be thinking, what Saturn has a hexagon? What does that even mean? Does they have like a toy it plays with or something. Yeah. I mean, I have to admit I had no idea what this was before you send me the notes for this episode. Yeah, well it's incredible. I mean I thought Saturn had like an octagon or a you know, pentagon, but not a hexagon. That sounds somehow more sinister, right, Like octagon and pentagon sound like they involved in some devious scheme or something. But a hexagon, I guess the hexagon is more benign. Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's something nice about the number six. But I love this topic and we'll dig into the details of it. Sort of. The broader sense of it is is learning about the other stuff that goes out there, you know, like the more we discover other planets and and other systems and more we learn that stuff here on Earth is kind of I don't know, sedate, you know, like the biggest mountains in the Solar System not here on Earth, the highest temperatures in the Solar System, not here on Earth, the deepest valleys not here on Earth. Right, the weirdest stuff in the Solar System is not here, And our things here on Earth are kind of I don't know, calm and and uh and easy going compared to the extremes we find elsewhere in the just in our solar system. You're saying, Earth is like the key west of the solar system, you know, calm weather. Yeah, exactly. Imagine you were a civilization that like, you know, formed in in the southern Florida or something where along the equator, and you imagine the whole Earth was like that, and then you traveled north and like learned about snow and stuff like that. You be like, whoa, this is crazy. Why do people even live here? That's what I think of the North All. That's when I think of every time I go to Chicago, I'm like, I love this town, but why is it here? Seriously, Like this town should be on the west coast. So yeah, So Saturn has a hexagon. And so if you've never heard of this before, and you are a at a computer maybe or on your phone on the subway or or the or the train, um, just take a second and just google image. Google search for Saturn hexagon. I think your mind will be blown when you see the images that come up. That's right, all of your flabbers will be gassed. And for those of you who don't have a screen in front of you, and and we don't want you to pick up your phone and while you're driving and start typing this into Google. We can describe it for you briefly. Basically, if you look at the top of Saturn, there is an enormous cloud pattern in the shape of a hexagon. And it's not like, no, that's not really hexagon. I mean you look at this thing and you think, whoa, that's a hexagon. It's a storm, and it looks at different color than the rest of the planet, and the outline of it looks like a perfect hexagon. It's not like a weird blob with six sides of different sizes. It's like a perfect hexagon. Yeah, I think perfect. My stretching it a little bit, but it's definitely hexagonal. Right, It's not like a circle with suggestions a little hint of hexagons. It's like a slightly rounded hexagon. It's it's pretty strange and it's big. It's sort of it's sort of like a hat on Saturn, right, Yeah, exactly. This is not a small thing. I think it sort of looks like a yarmu cut, a six sided yamica. Yeah, that's right, you know, like the six pointed star. Maybe Saturn is a Jewish Planet's Jewish? Yeah? Maybe? Yeah, it's the Holy Land after all. And you know, the amazing thing about this is that we've never seen anything that shape before. And when we looked all around Earth and storms on Earth, you know, they're like round usually or a round dish, right, And we looked all over the Solar System. You know, Jupiter has storms on it and they're circular or they're like a little oblong or whatever. We've never seen something on another planet that's a geometrical shape. The only things we've ever seen that are hexagonal are here on Earth and their civilization, you know, unless you're talking about like bees, honeycombs and stuff, and that's still that's proof of life. It's a pretty suspicious thing, right, isn't it. It's not round like or a blob. It's it's like it looks like it has six sides to it. Yeah, it looks constructed. And so immediately your brain goes to like, oh my god, are there aliens on Saturn? Right? And then you think, okay, I have to come up with some other explanation, because you know, the alien explanation wild antilizing, and while I always want to go there because I'm desperate to meet these aliens, it's got to be low on the list. Right. If there were aliens on Saturn, they were capable of doing this kind of thing, we probably would have heard from them before now. So you've got to think of some other explanation for it. But we'll dig into that. Well, this is a perfect point to take a break, Daniel. I feel like, if you ever meet aliens or gonna be like the super eager person that really wants to, I'm totally gonna fanboy out about the one thing. Yeah, family, you're like, how did you get here? I love your work, by the way, I'm so impressed. No, I'm gonna be shameless, Absolutely absolutely. I will fanboard those alien physicists for sure. Well, I definitely want their autograph as well. But before we dig into it, I thought, what do people know about it? Do people even know that this is a thing? Um? So I ran around campus that you see Irvine, and I asked folks if they knew that Saturn had a hexagon on it. Here's what people had to say, did you know that Saturn has a storm on it that's almost a perfect hexagon. No, I did not. Do you have any explanation for that? Does that seem natural to you? Definitely not natural? I mean it is natural, but it doesn't sound natural. I'm not sure because like there's things in nature that are like hexagons, right, like honeycombs, like can be artificial, artificial. So you think, like Aliens made a storm on Saturn? What do you think? I think Aliens is a stretch, but maybe I don't know. I feel like it could be natural since we've never really explored I'm not sure, but maybe exists. Okay, So you don't think it's Aliens. Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah, because I feel like there's different types, like gravity on Earth is different than any other planet. I really thought of that. I feel like that might be an artificial thing based on precedence on Earth, so most things are circular, so something that would be hexagonal would suggest that there's many fronts converging on one one site to control the flow. I can't believe that it would be natural. And the thing that I think of is, uh, the organization of spatial representation in the end torontal cortex of the mammalian brain the grid cells. Most people say no, but then you actually showed them a picture of it, right, that's right. I showed them a picture and then I said, so what do you think does this seem like something that could be, you know, naturally occurring or is it evidence of aliens? Does it look artificial? So that's that was maybe the more interesting question. And you know, some people were like, well, it's definitely not natural. Well it doesn't sound natural. I mean, how could that be possible? A lot of people went straight to aliens though, you know, some people had some ideas. What kinds of ideas did people have? Well a lot of people thought, you know, artificial though maybe I was planning that idea in their heads, you never know. Um, But some people pointed out, you know, like bees and honeycombs, that there are some things in nature that are naturally hexagonal. But those things, again, that's life, right, They're not inorganic things you find that are hexagonal. And I thought somebody who was going to say, well, you know, maybe crystals, right, because you can get naturally forming crystals that are squares or totally geometric shapes, though certainly not the size of this thing on Saturn. Well, we haven't seen one before. And anyway, this is a cloud pattern, right, not not a crystal. So you do see some hexagons in nature sometimes, Okay, it's not kind of like a fractals thing, Like maybe there's something small hexagonal that comes out as a huge hexagonal storm. That would be awesome. Mean, if there's some amazing crystal at the center of this storm that's shaping the whole thing, I love it. Let's go to Saturn and figure it out. I'm gonna drop you into the center of that storm to retrieve that crystal. That sounds like a great movie, doesn't it. Saturn's hexagon. Retrieving Saturny's the race for Saturn's hexagon. So let's let's dig into it. Then let's talk about what we do know and don't know about this weird, almost artificial looking feature on Saturday. I think the most important thing to understand is the scale of this thing. This is not like a hexagon the size of a school bus or even a small town, or even like you know, North America, or even the Earth. Okay, each side of this hexagon is the size of the Earth, which makes the whole thing. It's twenty thousand miles wide. So imagine a storm that was in the shape of a hexagon, and each side of that storm is bigger than the Earth. It's unbelievable. It's bigger than the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. So it's a giant storm. And for a whole length of the of an Earth, it's it has a straight edge, yeah, and then it bends right. The straight edge is weird, and then it bends. It bends six degrees and then it goes straight again for another length of the Earth, and and it does at six times. And for people who aren't familiar with Saturn, remember Saturn is a gas planet, which means that the outer layers of Saturn are just this hot, dense gas. Right, It's not like there's an atmosphere above a rocky surface. There's something very dense in the core. But basically Saturn is just a big ball of gas and it gets denser and denser as you go. And we can dig into the structure of Saturn in a in another episode. But what we're looking at is basically clouds on Saturn and they rotate, you know, they move around Saturn, etcetera, etcetera. Um, so we're looking at this cloud patterns. But the interesting thing about this hexagon is that it doesn't rotate with respect to Saturn like it moves with Saturn, and it seems like it's sort of fixed to Saturn. That is, it rotates the same rate as the rest of the planet, whereas some of the cloud bands below it and on Jupiter they can rotate faster or slower. Yeah. Well, I think one thing we should mention is that they might help people grasp this is that the storm is kind of centered around the north pole of Saturn. Right, that's right. It's like a hat on Saturn. Yeah, exactly, And there isn't one on the south pole, right, There's only one on the north pole. And so that might explain a little bit why it's so symmetrical, Right, It's it's sort of like it's it's centered around the whole spinning of the planet. Yeah, that might be the one thing about it that makes any sense, Right, that the center of the hexagon is the north pole of Saturn. It would be even weirder if it was like offset somehow. Do you think maybe it's like Saturn and Jupiter having a little competition, you know, Jupiter is like, hey, look I got a red tattoo, and Santa's like, oh, yeah, well I got a little blue hexagon. That's definitely the most likely explanation for sure. Yeah, and I'm I'm just wondering what the Jupiter is going to come up with. The one up Saturn is hexagon, right, another eye, Jupiter did absorb a comet that was pretty spectacular. So it's huge, this storm. And so what makes it a storm as opposed to the whole planet, which is sort of like a giant cloud. Yeah, that's a great question. What makes this storm? I think the whole planet is basically a storm, you know, and this is just one part of it. Um. These clouds are moving at pretty high speed, and so I guess that's what you would call a storm. Um. And that's fascinating also because you know, we see these things on gas giants, these persistent patterns of clouds we call them storms. But here on Earth storms don't last years or decades or centuries. Right. The great red spot in Jupiter is like at least a century old. This thing on Saturn, we have no idea how long it's been there. We saw it first in one but on Earth, like I looked it up the longest recorded storm ever on Earth was like thirty one days. So there's something that's like stable and weird about these cloud patterns on the gas giants that just doesn't happen here on Earth. It might just be kind of a skill thing, right, I mean, Jupiter and Saturn are so much bigger than the Earth. Yeah, that certainly could be it. And that's why I think it's so fascinating to look at the atmospheres of other planets because we never see that kind of thing here on Earth because the particular their details of Earth. As you say, it's a particular size, and so we don't get to see like what weird effects only happen when you have a planet that's like a thousand times bigger, and that's why it's so fascinating. But you know, you look at it and then you have to ask the question, like, how is it possible? What's the physics there? Can we understand it? We certainly didn't predict it. Nobody before we saw it said I call out that there's going to be a hexagon on top of Saturn. Wow, that would have been impressive. Nobody predicted it. But in theory it should be explainable. Right, everything we see out there in the universe should have a natural physical explanation. Then the game is, can we put together a story that tells us why that happens there and why it doesn't happen anywhere else? Right, And the weird thing is that it's sort of a different color than the rest of the planet. Right, It's almost like the whole planet is gas and clouds, but there's this one group of clouds. It's a different color, and it's in the shape of a hexagon. Yeah, what color would you say it is? I think it's sort of blue green? Yeah, I would agree. I think the aliens have great taste, better than the jew Jupiterranyan aliens, whatever you can say that Jovian sorry, Jovian aliens. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's a pretty pretty color. As far as we know from sort of symbol probes that we've done, it goes about sixty miles deep, right, so it's not just on the very top of the cloud layers. It's really in there. And more recently they did a fly by and um and they found something really fascinating that the clouds above this, uh, this hexagon, so sort of in the very center and above it there's another hexagon. It's like a vortex in the very high atmosphere above it, not in the center of the hexagon. There's the vortex there as well, but well above the hexagon there's another vortex and that one is also hexagon shape. Wow, and it's centered. I mean it's in the north pole of the planet as well. Yeah, it's sort of above the north pole. It's like as if, you know, you found some weird hexagonal ocean currents in the north pole of Earth, and then above it you found hexagonal clouds or something. There's two layers to this hexagon, and this, the second part, was only recently discovered. So that's pretty wild to have such a huge thing, such a huge storm, and have it be a very specific shape. Yeah. I think, um, the fact that there are two hexagons totally supports your massive glowing hexagon alien crystal on the top of Saturn. Well, let's get into that. Let's get into what scientists think might be causing this feature in our solar system and what we don't know about it. But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're talking about Saturn's hexagon, and so this was I was impressed by this. This was only recently discovered, right Daniel in Yeah, voyager flu by Saturn and you know took some of the first close up pictures. And I would have loved to have been in the control room when that first picture got downloaded. You know, this is one and this is pictures some voyager, So it was sort of like downloading pictures from the internet, you know twenty years ago. You get like a line at a time, you're like waiting for it to come across, and it must have been like slowly revealed. And what's it like to be in the control room when such a bizarre thing comes onto your screen for the first time ever? Um, it must have been a wonderful moment. Yeah, do you think they were They were going like, oh my god, Alien. I think they're probably finding the grad students to me like, this is not an appropriate prank to play. Okay. I know you think this is funny, but making a fake hexagon in the data is not okay. Um, they must have really doubted their results for the first a few minutes because it's just crazy. So before we couldn't see it. Before we even with our telescopes, we couldn't make out this hexagon. That's right. Yeah, we just didn't have close up enough pictures of Saturn to see this thing. And also it's on the north pole, so it's harder to see from our angle. It's easier to see from above, right, And so what you need is a satellite, you know, to fly by Saturn and to see it. And Saturn of course a gorgeous planet. Anyway, you want closer pictures of the ings and the clouds an incredible thing. Um, but then this hexagon is just so baffling. Well, it seems that Saturn is definitely winning the one upmanship with the Jupiter. I mean, it's got the rings, got the hexagon. Don't let the Jovians hear you say that, man. So, so let's get into what might be causing this weird hexagonal pattern in Saturn. Right, If it's not aliens, what could it possibly be. Yeah, so, um, here's my list of possible explanations. One aliens, that's the whole list. Is this in an order of preference or or a wish fulfillment, that's the whole list. Of the order doesn't matter. Um, we have no other consensus explanation. I mean, they're really just there's nobody who knows what could be making this thing. There are some folks who have done some some studies to say, maybe it's some weird thing with fluid hydrodynamics and cloud shapes and all sorts of stuff interacting with like magnetic fields and and all sorts of other stuff. But nobody can reproduce this. I mean, if it's a something that needs to be that size, which is why you don't see it on earth, then of course you're not gonna be able to make it in the lab. And there are some people who have done some stuff, like they put liquid in a vat and they spin it and they try to see, can we see any weird shapes in the spinning liquid and we make stables shapes and the spinning liquid or spinning gas, and you know, they see some things, but nobody is really convinced by it. So what do you mean, like not even you can't even simulate this pattern. There's no explanation in the sense that we have no experiments they can reproduce it, and not even simulations that can that can construct this. And you know those simulations are not easy to do, right. You need a vast, vast system you're simulating lots and lots of particles, um, so it would be a lot of computation. There might be some really clever ways to sort of model the whole system. But you're looking for this this thing to emerge, right, You can't like put the hexagon into your calculations. You want the hexagon to emerge naturally to show how it can be produced, So you have to model it from sort of a low level, like model all the particles bouncing around and showed that this comes out. And that's pretty tough. Couldn't you assume the hexagonal shape and then kind of try to guess what kinds of forces or processes you would need to get that shape. Yeah, and people have thought about that, you know, like could there be maybe vortices on the outside of it, Like imagine a circle, and then if you happen to have six regularly spaced vortices or clouds on the outside of it that are sort of drawn towards the north pole, they might be exerting pressure on those sides and bending them from a circle into sort of straighter lines. That's one sort of idea, but there's there's no real support for that, Like nobody has shown that that works in simulation. I think it must be on a list of you know, astrophysics projects. People are like, well, somebody's got to explain that, but nobody knows how to get started, so we just sort of keep it on the list of big questions until somebody comes along with a good idea and it's been defers like, you do it, no, you do it, I don't want to do it. But there are a lot of great stories like that in science, or there's sort an open puzzle for decades and nobody really knows how to approach, and then somebody finally comes along and says, okay, I'm making that my PhD topic, and they dive in and sometimes they figure it out, and those that's wonderful. You know, that's wonderful. I'm glad that we have these big hanging questions out there for people to dive into. I don't want people to think that most of the universe is figured out or explained or theren't. They aren't immediate, tangible questions to be answered. So this is a pretty big one. So there could be somebody listening to us right now thinking, hey, maybe I'll be the one to crack this mystery. Yeah, and it could be that somebody listening to this right now is the person that cracks this mystery. And when you figure it out and you discover the aliens, hey mention my name to them. I know this guy who's a huge fan. I did a bunch of digging to try to figure out what do people think about hexagon? Like what do the experts think about it? There really isn't a lot out there, and so because it's a pretty third of thin amount of stuff to read, you end up pretty quickly out in the weeds. And I watched a lot of videos of people analyzing this picture and basically concluding that they were aliens. That's why you were telling me you were looking at this um really reputable academic source YouTube, that's right. On YouTube, you can find lots of videos of people pouring over this pictures of the hexagon, being like, look, this is a city. See here you can see a dome, and this must be a road and whatever. Um, A lot of people are convinced that there's it's a huge alien megastructure and that NASA is somehow covering it up. Well, what are they seeing in the pattern that maybe scientists are not, or they think that scientists are not. I don't know what they're seeing because I looked through these patterns also, and it just looks like clouds to me. Um. I think they must have been smoking some pretty good banana peals to make those conclusions. You know, it's sort of like a roor shock test, like you know, you see what you want to see. Use zooming on those clouds and the inside of the this is in the inside of the hexagon. Zoom in on those clouds and you can see whatever you want. But it really is weird, right, Like it it's weird for anything natural to be just going a straight line like that and then take regular turns in one direction. Yeah, exactly, it's really weird. I think that's the weirdest part for me. Are those turns? You know, how does that happen? How does like a huge high speed band of clouds bend like that? You know, it's usually it's if it encounters an obstacle or something, um, which would suggest you know, there's something underneath it that's that's causing it. Uh, we really don't know. I was thinking about, you know, temperature gradients, like maybe the reason there are large storms on gas giants is because they're sort of further out from the Sun, which makes the tops of them cold. Right, the outer atmosphere is colder because it's further from the Sun, but then the interior is very hot. So maybe they're just like larger temperature gradients. Like the difference between the cloud tops and the center is huge, and that's that's the kind of stuff that causes weather here on Earth, right, cold air meeting hot air. Yeah, there's definitely something strange about these gas giants, right, like Saturn and Jupiter that are basically just giant balls of gas that there's a lot of like physics that we don't really we understand when you when you have that munch of gas, that's right, you don't know. There's a lot of a lot of good jokes that that I'm just going to step right around because this is a family friendly episode, Um, but exactly, and that's why we want to study it. You know, we are looking at planets outside our Solar system, and we're just soon going to be getting images of those for the first time, and we're gonna be seeing even stranger weather patterns, I hope, and one day we'll be we'll be looking at those to decide where should we go? Where should humanities next home be? And we want to pick a place that's nice to live on, right, we want to find another key West. And so it's good to get experienced just in our neighborhood looking at planets and saying do we understand this weather? Can? We had to figure this out. The more we understand about exoplanet atmospheres, the better will be in choosing a place for humanity to survive. So it's kind of like Stonehenge in a way, right, Like it's like it's like the Stonehenge of Saturn. It's like it's there. It's obviously shouldn't be there, and it's weird that it's there, but there's no real physical explanation for why it's there. Yeah, that's a good analogy. It's like a massive Saturnian Stonehenge. So basically the Irish did it. And I think, um, a lot of people thought Stonehee was also built by aliens, didn't they? Oh, well maybe it's all related Stonehenge a hexagon. Oh my god, we cracked the code. Did we just solve two mysteries? We just cracked the code? All right? This is turning into a Dan Brown novel. So yeah, so there are interesting and amazing mysteries out there, even in our solar system that even physicists are flabbergasted about gassing their flabbers flabberries are gasting. And so it's right there for you guys, out there, for future scientists to try to figure it out. That's right. So next time you're outside in the night sky, look up and remember there's weird stuff going on really far away, but also right here close to home. They're big mysteries and little mysteries and six sided mysteries for you to solve. Enjoy the view and all of some of those mysteries for us, because I am dying to know what's going on. Daniel is dying to meet some that's right. That's right, and trade all of your lives for some secrets of the universe. Alright, Well, on that note, see you next time. Thanks for tuning in. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio from More podcast from my heart Radio. Visit the I Heart Radio Apple Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.