Saturn is really weird

Love the hexagon. Thanks for posting it.

There are lots of those sorts of stationary waves in nature--e.g. ripples in a stream. One really good one is when you have a slow flow of water from a tap and move a plate or something up about half an inch below the spout--you get a big blob that necks down to almost nothing.

The Earth's auroras often appear as eccentric ellipses for much the same reason.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

I think looking at dead planets is like looking at a garbage dump and going "Oooo I think that was a banana peel". :P

The really interesting stuff is finding other solar systems like ours.

Now there's some motivation to figure out space travel without dying of old age. Who wants to visit a ball of gas.

D from BC myrealaddress(at)comic(dot)com British Columbia Canada

I like to think it's an artifact. I guess it's just the romantic in me.

John

Here's a 2 step plan for space travel.

Step 1: Stop aging. Aging has to stop so scientists can live long enough to create artificial intelligence. (Einstein could have done more if he didn't croak..)

Step 2: Create AI. Let the AI figure out the space travel problem.

D from BC myrealaddress(at)comic(dot)com British Columbia Canada

So, you're anti-research?

I think we shold visit some of those Jovian and Saturnine moons with the liquid water, and see if they've got tubeworms. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

It looks like a standing wave in Saturn's natural oscillation pattern. The planet is probably ringing like a bell, like the Sun is:

Cheers! Rich

Do tubeworms taste good?

D from BC myrealaddress(at)comic(dot)com British Columbia Canada

Probably not - they metabolize sulfur. =:-O

Cheers! Rich

Also worth a look at the Cassini mission home page for latest news.

Same images but the original NASA press release info.

I expect they will try this again to get dynamical details of the aurora.

Regards, Martin Brown