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Mystery in space

Photo: AP

AT NIGHT: Saturn's north

An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA's Cassini mission. The spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image. "This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. The hexagon is similar to the Earth's polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region. On Saturn, the vortex has a hexagonal rather than circular shape. The hexagon is nearly 25,000 km (15,000 miles) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it.

COMPLIED BY SUBAJAYANTHI B.

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