The recent cold snap across the U.S. dusted off some neurons that hadn’t been used since Earth Science- and in the process I made a pretty cool (lol) connection with some images of Saturn recently released from NASA. The Earth has a vortex of cold air spinning around its North Pole, and in early January this vortex branched out and dropped a blanket of cold air onto the Americas.
As you can tell from the above images, our polar vortex isn’t especially consistent or symmetrical in shape. The same can not be said for Saturn’s polar vortex…
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University
The beautiful series of images above was taken from the Cassini spacecraft. “The hexagon”, as it’s known, has a hurricane at its center with cloud speeds of 330 miles per hour.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
It’s awesome to see well-documented phenomena on Earth taken to their extreme on foreign planets. Hopefully we’ll see more as we continue to explore the worlds in our solar system and beyond.
Check out more stunning images of the hexagon here.
Vincent Cannataro, Ph.D. 