An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA's Cassini mission. 
Weird science ... NASA's Cassini spacecraft has taken an image of a strange hexagonal vortex at Saturn's north pole / Reuters-NASA 
This nighttime view of Saturn's north pole shows a bizarre six-sided hexagon feature encircling the entire north pole. The red color indicates the amount of 5-micron wavelength radiation, or heat, generated in the warm interior of Saturn that escapes the planet. Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
A BIZARRE six-sided feature encircling the north pole of Saturn has been snapped by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
The image is one of the first clear images ever taken of the north polar region as seen from a unique polar perspective and was originally discovered and last observed by a spacecraft during NASA's Voyager flybys of the early 1980s.
The new views of the polar hexagon taken late last year prove this is an unusually long-lived feature on Saturn.
The red colour indicates the amount of radiation, or heat, generated in the warm interior of Saturn that escapes the planet.
A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures.
The spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.
"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
"We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."
The hexagon is similar to Earth's polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region.
On Saturn, the vortex has a hexagonal rather than circular shape.
The hexagon is nearly 25,000km across - nearly four Earths could fit inside it.
Source:
Bizarre hexagon on Saturn snapped | | The Australian 
Bizarre hexagon spotted on Saturn's north pole 
