A second hexagon in the stratosphere of Saturn

https://mesonstars.com/inteteresting/they-find-a-second-hexagon-in-the-stratosphere-of-saturn/

by jdkee • 5 years ago

132 60 5 years ago

While I am confident there is a rational scientific explanation for the hexagon of Saturn, it is undoubtedly an incredible synchronicity that the storm exists. Saturn being the sixth planet from the sun it has historically been associated with the hexagon within occult symbolism since well before humans could have verified such a storm exists. Truly a remarkable find and fact of our solar system.

ethbr0• 5 years ago

I'd say the locals went a bit overboard with their tourism billboard, but I suppose 27,600 km across isn't too big relative to the distance it might be seen at.

lemurian• 5 years ago

Another fun scenario to consider: if you could hop in a time machine and show these pictures to your favorite historical figure with occult interests (Pythagoras, Plato, Newton, John Dee), they wouldn't be surprised at all. "Oh yeah, we've known about that one FOREVER!"

night8623• 5 years ago

I doubt they knew about the hexagonal storms, i dont have any idea if any 2000 y/o figures at all had any idea about planets, but maybe this could be a humorous rick and morty plot twist.

To change the subject almost completely to "weird things Plato argued", Plato recounted an interesting myth about the origin of sexes in the Symposium, that essentially humans were once male and female, with 4 arms and 4 legs and 2 faces, basically two people fused back-to-back.

If you examine human phylogeny, you will see that this isn't exactly true, but it's kinda close. Female and Male sex organs are derived from one structure in fetal development, the "gonad", which resolves into one or the other organ later during development. The full structure of male and female sex organs are actually rather visually similar (if you remove them and isolate the organ from the body, of course).

But the proto-humans or duplex-humans, not sure what its called, were too fast/strong/versatile because of these extra limbs and extra brain, Plato sort of inserting here the notion that maybe because they had 4 arms they were sort of 2x as strong/fast, these critters began scaling mount Olympus with the intention of challenging the gods, and it made Zeus a little nervous, or really i guess recognize that there would have to be a solution, even though he did not want to destroy the humans, he couldn't allow this challenge to continue.

Resultantly, Zeus decided to split the humans in two This would weaken the humans but allow them to continue most of their mortal endeavors. As a side effect, instead of vying for the power of the Olympians, they would be too rapt with lust, love, procreation to challenge the gods any longer.

Kind of cute I guess, that since they were separated in such a fashion, humans would forever yearn for wholeness that can come only from reunion with their actual other half :P

Thanks Zeus. You've really ruined a lot of my weekends.

elihu• 5 years ago

As weird as the Saturn hexagon is, I think the oddly symmetrical polar storms of Jupiter have it beat in terms of "gawp factor".

Also the ridge on Iapetus is worth an honorable mention if we're talking about things that don't look like they belong in nature.

What a strange place this solar system is.

jkubicek• 5 years ago

Iapetus Ridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_ridge_on_Iapetus

Polar Storms of Jupiter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Jupiter#Circumpo...

bolasanibk• 5 years ago

More weirdness in our Solar System

Mimas - A moon of Saturn which from certain angles looks like a death star. [1]

Hyperion - Another moon of Saturn which looks like a sponge. [2]

Phobos - A moon of Mars with a huge crater on one end.[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimas_%28moon%29 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(moon) [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_(moon)

anothernewdude• 5 years ago

It's what a wave looks like wrapped around a pole.

reality_inspctr• 5 years ago

Also the hexagon and circle being so similar to carbon. Like the team logo for consciousness.

eternalban• 5 years ago

Note that the idea of "6th planet" implies the ancients had placed the Earth in the 3rd rock position, which is news. It has nothing to do with a positional order.

Saturn is the alchemical Lead, with symbol: .

But speaking of "syncronicity", consulting my copy of C. G. Jung's Alchemical Studies, on pages 226-8 he writes:

"But the most important of all for an interpretation of Mercurius is his relation to Saturn. Mercurius senex is identical with Saturn, and to the earlier alchemists especially, it is not quicksilver, but the lead associated with Saturn, which usually represents the prima materia. In the Arabic text of the Turba quicksilver is identical with the 'waters of moon and Saturn'. In the 'Dicta Belini', Saturn says: 'My spirit is the water that loosens rigid limbs of my brothers'. This refers to the 'eternal water' which is just what Mercurius is. [...] Like Mercurius, Saturn is hermaphroditic. Saturn is 'an old man on a mountain, in him the natures are bound with their complement [i.e. the four elements], and all this is in Saturn'. [...] the Gnostic teaching [is] that Kronos (Saturn) is a 'power of the colour of water' which destroys everything, since 'water is destruction'.

"Like the planetary spirit of Mercurius, the spirit of Saturn is 'very suited to this work'. One of the manifestations of Mercurius in the alchemical process of tranformation is the lion, now green and now red. Khunrath calls this transformation "luring the lion out of Saturn's mountain cave'. From ancient times the lion was associated with Saturn. Khunrath calls him the 'lion of the Catholic tribe', paraphrasing the 'lion of the tribe of Judah' -- an allegory of Christ. He calls Saturn 'the lion green and red'. In Gnosticism Saturn is the highest archon, the lion-headed Ialdabaoth, meaning 'Child of Chaos'. But in alchemy the child of chaos is Mercurius.

"The relation to and identity with Saturn is important because Saturn is not only a maleficus but actually the dwelling place of the devil himself. Even as the highest archon and demiurge his Gnostic reputation was not the best. According to one Catholistic source, Beelzebub was associated with him [i.e. Mercurius]. Mylius says that if Mercurius were to be purified, then Lucifer would fall from heaven. [...] Khunrath says: 'Good with the good, Evil the the evil.'"

Based on that, we can see that the occult Hexagram -- closely related to the 11th ("Peace") and 12th ("Stagnation") Hexagrams of the I-Ching -- is a reference to the intertwined trinities of Good (white triangle) and Evil (black triangle), which depending on the orientation (per the I-Ching) denote either positive or negative spiritual transformations.

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

Saturn being the sixth planet from the sun it has historically been associated with the hexagon within occult symbolism since well before humans could have verified such a storm exists.

By who? There can't be a traditional association for the obvious reason that, until fairly recently, there were only 5 planets and there was no way to know which of them were how far from the Sun.

sdenton44• 5 years ago

Wikipedia puts discovery of the first six planets under 'prehistoric.'

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_discovery_of_Sol...

ryantgtg2• 5 years ago

You are being too rational. There is, of course, an explanation for why people knew of the hexagon in ancient times:

Some theorists believe in the very distant past the planets were arranged much differently. This would have been back in the Golden Age, when shit was good and Saturn wasn’t pissed off from hearing that prophecy yet. Supposedly this was when Atlantis thrived and Saturn hung stationary in the sky directly overhead. This theory comes from the people over at the Thunderbolts Project, who have also proposed many other radical new ideas such as the universe being electric and Saturn being a second sun. The theory that we live in a binary star system has correlations with the Nazi’s belief in a Black Sun.

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ce7vue/the_satu...

https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/about/syn/

mannykannot• 5 years ago

That's a good point, especially as the Earth was regarded as the center of the universe. Ptolemy apparently had to put Mercury and Venus inside of the Sun's orbit [1] (note that if you replace 'inside of the Sun's orbit' with 'between the Earth and the Sun', you get a proposition that holds then and now! Ptolemy had to deal with the fact that Mercury and Venus do not stray far from the Sun.)

Nevertheless, in that model, Saturn ends up as the outermost heavenly body, other than the stars, presumably because it has the longest period. Even so, it does not count as the sixth unless you include either the Sun or Moon, but not both.

[1]http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/more_stuff/Ap...

adrian_b4• 5 years ago

In Antiquity the planets were believed to move around the Earth, not the Sun, so they estimated the distances from the planets to the Earth.

While there was no way to estimate a numeric distance, they have correctly estimated which planets are closer and which are more distant, based on their angular speed on the sky.

So it was always correctly believed that Saturn is the farthest from the Earth, because it has the slowest angular speed, followed by Jupiter, then by Mars.

It was believed that there are 7 special celestial bodies, adding the Sun and the Moon.

However I am not aware of any association between Saturn and the number 6.

Saturn and Jupiter became associated with black lead (i.e. lead) and white lead (i.e. tin), because Saturn is less bright and it moves slower on the sky than Jupiter, like the lead is less bright and also heavier than the tin.

jacobolus2• 5 years ago

As mentioned already, ancient peoples didn’t know that Earth is 3rd planet from the sun and Saturn is 6th.

But Saturn also has a ~30 earth-year long year, which means it goes about 1/12 of the way around its orbit each Earth year, relevant to hexagons which have symmetry axes at 12ths of a turn. (No idea if this is the source of any association between Saturn and hexagons.)

jacobolus2• 5 years ago

Er, wait a sec, that doesn’t make any sense. Chalk it up to tiredness.

With a ~30 Earth-year long year, Saturn of course goes about 1/30 of the way around its orbit each Earth year; this would just as closely relate it to a pentagon as a hexagon. It’s Jupiter with a ~12 Earth-year long year that would go about 1/12 of the way around its orbit each Earth year.

Saturn and Jupiter together have orbits that return to about the same state every ~60 years.

mjevans• 5 years ago

Worthy of more study. Please vote to fund your country's space programs.

temp0826• 5 years ago

How?

(Genuine question...)

radicaldreamer• 5 years ago

Contact your representatives. Every message they get about a project or program, they assume that there are 1000 (or some proportion more) who support it but didn't write in.

leephillips• 5 years ago

The stratospheric hexagon was observed in 2018: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06017-3

But since this weird site doesn’t put dates on its articles, who knows how old this “Legit News” item is.

dredmorbius2• 5 years ago

Wayback Machine earliest capture can be a useful guide.

Looks as if this is recent, by that (4 Sept, 2021):

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://mesonstars.com/inteter...

shoo• 5 years ago

the most recent publication with "hexagon" in the title from the quoted scientist, Leigh Fletcher, is:

R. Hueso, A. Sánchez-Lavega, J.F. Rojas, A.A. Simon, T. Barry, T. del Río-Gaztelurrutia, A. Antuñano, K.M. Sayanagi, M. Delcroix, L.N. Fletcher, E. García-Melendo, S. Pérez-Hoyos, J. Blalock, F. Colas, J. M. Gómez-Forrellad, J.L. Gunnarson, D. Peach, M.H. Wong (2019), Saturn atmospheric dynamics one year after Cassini: Long-lived features and time variations in the drift of the Hexagon, Icarus, Volume 336, 113429

https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.13849

jshprentz• 5 years ago

Obligatory, current, and timely XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2513/

hack_the_planet• 5 years ago

Fun fact, relevant to said XKCD: while it's not possible to construct a 3-dimensional convex polyhedron using only congruent, regular hexagons as faces, as the soccer ball example shows, it is possible to do so using a combination of congruent, regular hexagons and congruent, regular pentagons.

That's obviously not news, so, here's the fun part: such a polyhedron must always have exactly 12 pentagons. The proof of this isn't hard, and is based on Euler's formula, V - E + F = 2. See https://math.stackexchange.com/a/18347 for details.

oersted• 5 years ago

Bestagon :)

Nurdok• 5 years ago

Came in just to Ctrl+f "bestagon", was not disappointed.

dredmorbius2• 5 years ago

CGP Grey: https://youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY

rdist• 5 years ago

dang it, now I have to move my secret base again

z3t4• 5 years ago

Just tell the admin to copy/paste it to another location

locusofself• 5 years ago

Hexagons sometimes occur in nature as a result of heat dissipation patterns, like basalt columns when they cool, and oil when heated on an extremely uniform flat surface forms into a honeycomb like pattern of hexagons.

I think those usually don't happen as a single shape though, rather when there is crowding of material and it finding optimal entropy path, you end up with a bunch of them.

Could it be a related phenomena?

f_allwein• 5 years ago

Came here to post this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant%27s_Causeway . Fascinating

isoprophlex• 5 years ago

Related: polygonal vortices replicated in a bucket

https://physicsworld.com/a/polar-vortex-replicated-in-a-buck...

handrous• 5 years ago

Dunno why, but a quick glance at that article made me go "oh, it's just wave interference" and all the "look at the weird geometric shape at the pole of this planet" things suddenly made perfect sense.

... I mean, that might not actually be the explanation, but that's the intuition those bucket-photos brought to mind.

[EDIT] Clearly the "just", above, is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but you stretch some waves into a circle and then squish them down (say, against a point, like a pole) and you're gonna get polygon-ish shapes, right? The particulars are probably complex, but the notion that you'd get "artificial"-looking shapes at poles seems natural, now.

lifeisstillgood• 5 years ago

Some other areas hexagons appear in nature:

https://skainz12345.wixsite.com/the-land-of-rocks/single-pos...

gabrielblack• 5 years ago

Optical aberration + digital image processing ? Nobody ?

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/9597/what-does-a-h...

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/6605/why-do-light-...

A second hexagon in the stratosphere of Saturn

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