Ficlets

For those of you with a science fictional bent, here’s an interesting bit of your ficleteering consideration:

One of the most bizarre weather patterns in the solar system has been photographed at Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling the north pole…

“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Tuesday in an image advisory. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere, where circularly shaped waves and convective cells dominate, is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”

The hexagon is nearly 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it. The thermal imagery shows that the hexagon extends about 60 miles (100 kilometers) down into the clouds.

What on earth (or more accurately, on Saturn) could be making a hexagon the size of four of our home planets? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it. Have fun thinking up answers.