Unusual six-sided feature at Saturn's pole's identified.

[Tesha]

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070408



Now, the real story:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-034

[krispos42]

1. rotflmao

:spray:
:yourock:

[CrispyQ]

2. I love it!

:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

k&r

[screembloodymurder]

3. Put six bubbles around one and see what you get.

Bees make circular holes, but because of how they stack you get the appearance of a hexagon comb.

[tridim]

5. Good point, but wouldn't that require the bubbles to be uniform?

And honey combs don't spin, nor are they built on a sphere. Something else is going on there, but of all the regular polygons I'd expect to see naturally occurring in space, the hexagon is second only after the circle (an infinite sided polygon).

[Wilms]

4. !

:D

[tridim]

7. Who is this Allen guy anyway?

And why are his sockets appearing on gas giants?

[On the Road]

6. So What Happens When You Unscrew It?

:shrug:

[Tesha]

11. The RINGUM falls off of the GASGI. (NT)

[Peace Patriot]

8. Damned strange.

I was thinking perhaps an artificial structure, deep within, made of materials or emanating from an energy source that we don't yet know of, or understand?

When you think of the possibilities for sentient life in the universe--and of long-lived civilizations that could develop technologies far in advance of our own--it is not so outlandish. Was this some other civilization's giant battery? Or could it be the remnant of a DNA-manufacturing plant, perhaps used to seed earth and then abandoned?

Wild.

I've looked at a lot of pictures of planets and other stellar objects. Never saw anything like this. Saturn's rings come to mind. The geometry of distance. They seem too neat or something--then we find out that Saturn's moons are "shepherding" the rings. Still, they are rather surprising looking. But this. This beats all. Such an improbable shape in the midst of turmoil.

[tridim]

9. Saturn and it's moons are absolutely freaky

That's why Arthur Clarke chose the setting for his first Odyssey book. I still get chills when I read, "The eye of Iapetus had blinked, as if to remove an irritating speck of dust... (Bowman said) The thing's hollow, it goes on forever. My God, it's full of stars!"

They only used Jupiter in the movie because they couldn't make Saturn look right with late 60's special effects.

[Tesha]

10. The description they offered...

The description Clark/Kubrick offered in The Lost
Worlds of 2001] was that to make a realistic-
looking Saturn, they first had to make a realistic
looking Jupiter (i.e., a gas giant planet without
rings). Having achieved that first step, they
stopped ;).

Tesha

[jimlup]

12. My God It's Full of Stars!

I thought it was ashame that Kubrick didn't put this line in the movie. The ending was so disconnected that the general audience was lost. While readers of the book understood, I wonder if Kubrick really needed to go psycadelic like that or if he could have pulled it off more like Clark's orgininal with more time and thought.