Because hexagons are the bestagons.
the only answer i’ll ever need
SUPER BESTAGON
BEGIN
[LOUD THUMPING TECHNOMUSIC]
That brought back some PTSD…
And addiction, gotta play it again <3
The hexagon was invented by Pappus Alexandria, centuries before the release of unrelated Belgian techno anthem Pump Up the Jam.
Bestagons, Roll out!
wait…
This picture makes squares jealous
It’s actually a cube.
Square Pride!!
!lemmygold
If only there was a Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn’s_hexagon
A hypothesis developed at Oxford University is the hexagon forms where there is a steep latitudinal gradient in the speed of the atmospheric winds in Saturn’s atmosphere.[22] Similar regular shapes were created in a laboratory when a circular tank of liquid was rotated at different speeds at its centre and periphery. The most common shape was six sided, but shapes with three to eight sides were also produced. The shapes form in an area of turbulent flowbetween the two different rotating fluid bodies with dissimilar speeds.[22][23]A number of stable vortices of similar size form on the slower (south) side of the fluid boundary, and these interact with each other to space themselves out evenly around the perimeter. The presence of the vortices influences the boundary to move northward where each is present, and this gives rise to the polygon effect.[23] Polygons do not form at wind boundaries unless the speed differential and viscosity parameters are within certain margins and thus absent at other likely places, such as Saturn’s south pole or the poles of Jupiter.
Other researchers claim that lab studies exhibit vortex streets, a series of spiraling vortices not observed in Saturn’s hexagon. Simulations show a shallow, slow, localized meandering jetstream in the same direction as Saturn’s prevailing clouds are able to match the observed behaviors of Saturn’s hexagon with the same boundary stability.[24]
Developing barotropic instability of Saturn’s North Polar hexagonal circumpolar jet (Jet) plus North Polar vortex (NPV) system produces a long-living structure akin to the observed hexagon, which is not the case of the Jet-only system, which was studied in this context in a number of papers in literature. The NPV, thus, plays a decisive dynamical role to stabilize hexagon jets. The influence of moist convection, which was recently suggested to be at the origin of Saturn’s NPV system in the literature, is investigated in the framework of the barotropic rotating shallow water model and does not alter the conclusions.[25]
A 2020 mathematical study at the California Institute of Technology found that a stable geometric arrangement of the polygons can occur on any planet when a storm is surrounded by a ring of winds turning in the opposite direction to the storms itself, called an anticyclonic ring, or anticyclonic shielding.[26][27]Such shielding creates a vorticity gradient in the background of a neighbor cyclone, causing mutual rejection between the cyclones (similar to the effect of beta-drift). Although apparently shielded, the polar cyclone on Saturn cannot hold a polygonal pattern of circumpolar cyclones such as Jupiter’s due to the bigger size and slower wind speed of Saturn’s polar cyclone, so the side-adjacent vortices and deep barotropic instability (Cassini’s wind speed measurements preclude shallower barotropic instability at least at the time of the Cassini encounter), or possibly baroclinic instabilities remain as the most viable explanations for Saturn’s sustained hexagon.[28]
Test apparatus from Oxford article:
Resulting hexagons observed:
This is on my phone hope the text is readable.
Tl;Dr
“Why is it a hexagon”
Atmosphere outside hexagon spins faster than atmosphere inside hexagon
But why hexagon and not a circle
Laws of Physics. Also aliens. (Aliens created physics).
Ps. I’d also like to know the answer.
Circles are hard to render. It’s why we don’t have perfect spheres. Labs can only get “close to perfect”.
either that, or
They would never be so obvious
TIL all the Civilization maps are on Saturn
Only after civilization 3
*civ 4.
5 was the first one with a hex grid
Which is still my favorite for some reason
4… But I assumed a typo
That makes sense…
god playing settlers of catan here…
It’s less weird when you realize it’s not a hexagon, it’s a sine wave in cylindrical coordinates. There are a lot of negative feedback loops such that a sine wave can turn into a standing wave. You just have to get a little lucky with a couple important things like your rossby number et voila, hexagon.
this.ToEnglish()
Take this, bend it around the pole so it becomes circular.A planet with an investment chart for a pole. WHY.
sine waves aren’t strictly an investment thing, they are more of a general math thing and can be used to model a wide variety of stuff (in this case this graph is for investing, but for example it comes up in physics a lot)
Keep going… Sine waves are not an investment thing. They’re a math thing that can be usefully applied to some things (eg. physics) or poorly applied to almost anything (eg. finance/econ).
Capitalism ruining everything.
Damm good bait
Saturn’s butt is made of Bitcoin, got it.
Here’s a better visualization from Minute Physics how these “wave” patterns can make geometric shapes, using the fact that Earth’s moon doesn’t make a smooth circle around the sun.
That doesn’t sound less weird.
That’s where all the 10mm sockets end up
Only the six point ones.
Wat
Edit: oh, right, 12 point sockets
I was just thinking of popping out my hex set so I can pop open Saturn
It’s bees.
Its always bees
But never lupus
Wasn’t it actually lupus one time? Or am I misremembering?
Apparently, S04E08, “You Don’t Want to Know” is the one you’re thinking of, so, yes.
Unless it’s Bees.
Because hexagon is bestagon!
Excelentagon.
Because Saturn is Catan.
Base game got boring, I recommend the Ringfarers expansion.
Somewhat topically, Terraforming Mars clears
Things like Hexagons and the golden spiral occurring in nature are interesting - but very well-travelled.
And I don’t mean she travels a lot. -Bender Bending Rodriguez
Lazy rendering
I’d like to file a bug report, the texture wrapping is broken
TLDR That’s what happens when circles get squished together.
Because storms want to be circles but any given gas giants atmosphere is basically a series of nothing but storms and when you tile circles you get a hexagonal grid due to the spaces in between them?
So it’s a soccer ball
Standing wave. Earth kind of has one in the jet stream (3 peaks and troughs though, usually), but you can’t see it with visible light.
Aguiar, Ana C. Barbosa, et al. “A laboratory model of Saturn’s North Polar Hexagon.” Icarus 206.2 (2010): 755-763.
Get out of here with your real answers. 😜
I think the actual answer even with this source is, we sort of have some clues, but we have more questions too.
It is because this is how these things do be. QED.
That’s actually the prevailing theory. A hexagonal shape is the path of least resistance for the wind patterns on Saturn. It probably really is that simple.
If only we could see other natural hexagons somewhere
Unrelated though - that’s a packing efficiency thing.
I don’t think it’s completely unrelated though. I don’t claim to understand what’s actually going but seems to me that whatever winds are whipping about there could create fronts that are sort of similar as pressure as what happens with honeycombs. In one it’s just the cells themselves create the pressure whereas here it’s the giant planetwide storms.
Idk.
As a an interplanetary stormologist. Or a geometrisist.
The movement (kinetic energy) is the driver with the atmospheric patterns. There’s no movement in the honey comb.
I mean, they lay round cells, but because they layer them tightly, they get squeezed in, and form a hexagonal pattern. Possibly drying also affects it idk much about bee-engineering, apologies.
Classic application of the “it is what it is” lemma.
