Saturn Hexagon Pictured By Nasa's Cassini Spacecraft Is Rather Odd

Nasa Films The Mysterious Hexagon Rotating On Saturn

There are a lot of odd things in space. But this certainly ranks amongst the oddest.

A six-sided jet stream of 200-mile-per-hour winds, 20,000 miles across with a massive, rotating storm in the centre.

Nasa's Cassini spacecraft - responsible for such photographic gems as this - has taken the first ever complete view of it.

Located at Saturn's north pole, Nasa scientists note there is nothing quite like it anywhere else.

Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said: "The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable.

"A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades - and who knows - maybe centuries."

Weather patterns on Earth are interrupted when they encounter friction from landforms or ice caps. Scientists suspect the stability of the hexagon has something to do with the lack of solid landforms on Saturn - which is essentially a giant ball of very dense gas.

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