Saturn's weird hexagon has 'sandwich-like' layers of hazy mists
There's an extensive system of haze layers in the bizarre hexagon on Saturn, a new study has found. "Saturn's Hexagon" is a swirling maelstrom at the planet's north pole that, as its name implies, has an odd, hexagonal shape. The hexagon is an ever-present cloud pattern that "stands" tall as an enormous, whirling tower on the planet. The phenomenon was first discovered in 1980 by NASA's Voyager spacecraft and was later on imaged in exquisite detail by the Cassini spacecraft, which orbited the planet from 2004 to 2017. Now ina new study, scientists with the Planetary Science Group at the University of Basque Country used images from Cassini and the Hubble Space Telescope to show that Saturn's hexagon is more than just a geometric oddity. The feature has its own system of hazes layered on top of one another. In 2015, Cassini's main camera snapped high-resolution images of Saturn that revealed the hazes above the cloud...