Strange Things:

In this age when information propagates rapidly in many different directions it feels like students in my classes have heard of events or objects that haven't crossed my path. As a result I feel I need to track some of these and offer some background for the science associated with them.

Saturn's Hexagon

It seems perfectly understandable that if a gas planet is rotating very fast that there would be bands of clouds and vortices and other flow related features. Most of us do not think of hexgons as a feature we see in the rivers as we walk along them. This is why the image of a pretty well formed hexgon at the pole of Saturn seems so unexpected. Here is the original image.

Rotating fluids can do some fascinating things. Here is a good article about experiments that recreate forms like that seen on Saturn (here's the video!).