July 4, 2019 • 29 mins
Is it natural or artificial?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, Daniel, if aliens arrived to our solar system, do
you think they would know that we were here on
Earth before they landed? Like, could they tell from far away? Well,
I don't know. You think they're broadcasting episodes of our podcast.
Maybe they'd hear one. I'm not sure they would conclude
that we're that intelligent if they got this podcast, but well,
they'd hear that we love asking questions. I don't know.
(00:29):
I guess if they know they can't close enough to
Earth to see the surface but not see people, they
could probably see all sorts of weird geometric structures, you know,
circles from farming and cities and grids and stuff that
you just don't see in nature, like straight lines and
squares and perfect circles. Yeah, the kind of stuff you
don't see like coming naturally out of a forest or
some totally wild environment, like like a holiday in from
(00:51):
above exactly, Well, you don't see spontaneous holiday inns farming
in jungles. Right. Hi. I'm Morey. I'm a cartoonist and
(01:14):
the creator of PhD Comics. And I'm Daniel. I'm a
particle physicist, and I like asking questions about the universe.
Wondering about weird stuff and planning to collaborate with other
species against the for the downfall of humanity. And that's
perfect because I like drawing aliens and question marks. That's right.
That's why we make such a great team. Exactly. I
commit the crimes and you draw them, but I make
(01:35):
them funny and with sound effects. That's right. At my
trial for treason against humanity, I want you to be
the sort of court reporter that's drawing me sympathetically. Oh yeah,
I'll be there. I'll be drawing the mental map of
your guilty argumentation. But before that, you can see a
sample of our work because we wrote a book together
about questions about the universe. It's called We Have No Idea,
(01:57):
A Guide to the Unknown Universe. Yeah. It's full of awesome,
interesting questions about the universe and also cartoons, so check
it out. That's right. But today you're listening to our podcast,
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I
Heart Radio. That's right, And here's where we sit down
and chew on one particular question. Every episode, we try
to find something weird, something strange, something that you'd like
(02:20):
to hear discussed in more depth than you can just
google and break it down for you. Yeah, all kinds
of weird things out there in the universe and other
planets in the smallest of scales, things that are circular, square, spinning,
maybe even hexagonal. That's right. We like all kinds of questions,
two sided, four sided, even six sided questions. So today
on the podcast, we'll be talking about a pretty interesting
(02:43):
mystery right here in our solar system. I think even
pretty interesting is under selling it. I think it's flabbergasting.
When I first heard about this, I thought, whoa, that's
probably aliens. You were flabbergasted, That's right. All of my
flabbers were totally gasted by this concept. I don't even
know what that means, but it sounds like you're amazed.
(03:05):
I don't know. I'm trying to reduce the number of
flappers I have, actually, um as I get older. But yeah,
this is the kind of thing that it's sort of
a modern question because it's the kind of question that arises. Um.
The more we can see things, you know, the more
we look out into the universe, the more we see
stuff that we didn't expect, which is exactly why we
do look out into the universe to get those surprises. Yeah,
(03:27):
to get more data points about how the universe works, right,
because so far we can only mostly look around where
we are here on Earth. That's right. And I think
early humans thought, hey, look, this is the Earth, this
is the universe. Everything else is just details or supporting
cast right. And as we learn more and more about
our role in the universe, we learned that the universe
is huge. And but you might be tempted to do
(03:47):
extrapolate and said, well, maybe the rest of the universe
is just filled with Earth's also, right. But the more
we look out, the more we learn that the Earth
is weird, it's strange, it's it's unusual. There are just
in our Solar system. There are no other plan It's
like the Earth. Yeah, it's strangely not hexagonal. That's right.
That's right. So maybe you should stop teasing folks and
tell them exactly what we're talking about today. Yeah, So
(04:11):
to be on the program, we'll be talking a really
big mystery in our solar system. We'll be talking about
what is Saturn's hexagon? That's right. And you might be thinking,
what Saturn has a hexagon? What does that even mean?
Does they have like a toy it plays with or something. Yeah.
I mean, I have to admit I had no idea
(04:32):
what this was before you send me the notes for
this episode. Yeah, well it's incredible. I mean I thought
Saturn had like an octagon or a you know, pentagon,
but not a hexagon. That sounds somehow more sinister, right,
Like octagon and pentagon sound like they involved in some
devious scheme or something. But a hexagon, I guess the
hexagon is more benign. Yeah, I think so. I mean,
(04:53):
there's something nice about the number six. But I love
this topic and we'll dig into the details of it.
Sort of. The broader sense of it is is learning
about the other stuff that goes out there, you know,
like the more we discover other planets and and other
systems and more we learn that stuff here on Earth
is kind of I don't know, sedate, you know, like
the biggest mountains in the Solar System not here on Earth,
(05:14):
the highest temperatures in the Solar System, not here on Earth,
the deepest valleys not here on Earth. Right, the weirdest
stuff in the Solar System is not here, And our
things here on Earth are kind of I don't know,
calm and and uh and easy going compared to the
extremes we find elsewhere in the just in our solar system.
You're saying, Earth is like the key west of the
solar system, you know, calm weather. Yeah, exactly. Imagine you
(05:36):
were a civilization that like, you know, formed in in
the southern Florida or something where along the equator, and
you imagine the whole Earth was like that, and then
you traveled north and like learned about snow and stuff
like that. You be like, whoa, this is crazy. Why
do people even live here? That's what I think of
the North All. That's when I think of every time
(05:56):
I go to Chicago, I'm like, I love this town,
but why is it here? Seriously, Like this town should
be on the west coast. So yeah, So Saturn has
a hexagon. And so if you've never heard of this before,
and you are a at a computer maybe or on
your phone on the subway or or the or the train, um,
just take a second and just google image. Google search
for Saturn hexagon. I think your mind will be blown
(06:19):
when you see the images that come up. That's right,
all of your flabbers will be gassed. And for those
of you who don't have a screen in front of you,
and and we don't want you to pick up your
phone and while you're driving and start typing this into Google.
We can describe it for you briefly. Basically, if you
look at the top of Saturn, there is an enormous
cloud pattern in the shape of a hexagon. And it's
(06:40):
not like, no, that's not really hexagon. I mean you
look at this thing and you think, whoa, that's a hexagon.
It's a storm, and it looks at different color than
the rest of the planet, and the outline of it
looks like a perfect hexagon. It's not like a weird
blob with six sides of different sizes. It's like a
perfect hexagon. Yeah, I think perfect. My stretching it a
(07:00):
little bit, but it's definitely hexagonal. Right, It's not like
a circle with suggestions a little hint of hexagons. It's
like a slightly rounded hexagon. It's it's pretty strange and
it's big. It's sort of it's sort of like a
hat on Saturn, right, Yeah, exactly. This is not a
small thing. I think it sort of looks like a
yarmu cut, a six sided yamica. Yeah, that's right, you know,
(07:22):
like the six pointed star. Maybe Saturn is a Jewish
Planet's Jewish? Yeah? Maybe? Yeah, it's the Holy Land after all.
And you know, the amazing thing about this is that
we've never seen anything that shape before. And when we
looked all around Earth and storms on Earth, you know,
they're like round usually or a round dish, right, And
we looked all over the Solar System. You know, Jupiter
(07:44):
has storms on it and they're circular or they're like
a little oblong or whatever. We've never seen something on
another planet that's a geometrical shape. The only things we've
ever seen that are hexagonal are here on Earth and
their civilization, you know, unless you're talking about like bees,
honeycombs and stuff, and that's still that's proof of life.
It's a pretty suspicious thing, right, isn't it. It's not
(08:04):
round like or a blob. It's it's like it looks
like it has six sides to it. Yeah, it looks constructed.
And so immediately your brain goes to like, oh my god,
are there aliens on Saturn? Right? And then you think, okay,
I have to come up with some other explanation, because
you know, the alien explanation wild antilizing, and while I
always want to go there because I'm desperate to meet
these aliens, it's got to be low on the list. Right.
(08:26):
If there were aliens on Saturn, they were capable of
doing this kind of thing, we probably would have heard
from them before now. So you've got to think of
some other explanation for it. But we'll dig into that. Well,
this is a perfect point to take a break, Daniel.
(08:51):
I feel like, if you ever meet aliens or gonna
be like the super eager person that really wants to,
I'm totally gonna fanboy out about the one thing. Yeah, family,
you're like, how did you get here? I love your work,
by the way, I'm so impressed. No, I'm gonna be shameless,
Absolutely absolutely. I will fanboard those alien physicists for sure. Well,
(09:13):
I definitely want their autograph as well. But before we
dig into it, I thought, what do people know about it?
Do people even know that this is a thing? Um?
So I ran around campus that you see Irvine, and
I asked folks if they knew that Saturn had a
hexagon on it. Here's what people had to say, did
you know that Saturn has a storm on it that's
almost a perfect hexagon. No, I did not. Do you
(09:33):
have any explanation for that? Does that seem natural to you?
Definitely not natural? I mean it is natural, but it
doesn't sound natural. I'm not sure because like there's things
in nature that are like hexagons, right, like honeycombs, like
can be artificial, artificial. So you think, like Aliens made
a storm on Saturn? What do you think? I think
(09:55):
Aliens is a stretch, but maybe I don't know. I
feel like it could be natural since we've never really
explored I'm not sure, but maybe exists. Okay, So you
don't think it's Aliens. Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah,
because I feel like there's different types, like gravity on
Earth is different than any other planet. I really thought
(10:16):
of that. I feel like that might be an artificial
thing based on precedence on Earth, so most things are circular,
so something that would be hexagonal would suggest that there's
many fronts converging on one one site to control the flow.
I can't believe that it would be natural. And the
thing that I think of is, uh, the organization of
(10:40):
spatial representation in the end torontal cortex of the mammalian
brain the grid cells. Most people say no, but then
you actually showed them a picture of it, right, that's right.
I showed them a picture and then I said, so
what do you think does this seem like something that
could be, you know, naturally occurring or is it evidence
of aliens? Does it look artificial? So that's that was
(11:00):
maybe the more interesting question. And you know, some people
were like, well, it's definitely not natural. Well it doesn't
sound natural. I mean, how could that be possible? A
lot of people went straight to aliens though, you know,
some people had some ideas. What kinds of ideas did
people have? Well a lot of people thought, you know,
artificial though maybe I was planning that idea in their heads,
you never know. Um, But some people pointed out, you know,
(11:20):
like bees and honeycombs, that there are some things in
nature that are naturally hexagonal. But those things, again, that's life, right,
They're not inorganic things you find that are hexagonal. And
I thought somebody who was going to say, well, you know,
maybe crystals, right, because you can get naturally forming crystals
that are squares or totally geometric shapes, though certainly not
(11:40):
the size of this thing on Saturn. Well, we haven't
seen one before. And anyway, this is a cloud pattern, right,
not not a crystal. So you do see some hexagons
in nature sometimes, Okay, it's not kind of like a
fractals thing, Like maybe there's something small hexagonal that comes
out as a huge hexagonal storm. That would be awesome. Mean,
if there's some amazing crystal at the center of this
(12:02):
storm that's shaping the whole thing, I love it. Let's
go to Saturn and figure it out. I'm gonna drop
you into the center of that storm to retrieve that crystal.
That sounds like a great movie, doesn't it. Saturn's hexagon.
Retrieving Saturny's the race for Saturn's hexagon. So let's let's
dig into it. Then let's talk about what we do
know and don't know about this weird, almost artificial looking
(12:25):
feature on Saturday. I think the most important thing to
understand is the scale of this thing. This is not
like a hexagon the size of a school bus or
even a small town, or even like you know, North America,
or even the Earth. Okay, each side of this hexagon
is the size of the Earth, which makes the whole thing.
(12:46):
It's twenty thousand miles wide. So imagine a storm that
was in the shape of a hexagon, and each side
of that storm is bigger than the Earth. It's unbelievable.
It's bigger than the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. So
it's a giant storm. And for a whole length of
the of an Earth, it's it has a straight edge, yeah,
and then it bends right. The straight edge is weird,
(13:08):
and then it bends. It bends six degrees and then
it goes straight again for another length of the Earth,
and and it does at six times. And for people
who aren't familiar with Saturn, remember Saturn is a gas planet,
which means that the outer layers of Saturn are just
this hot, dense gas. Right, It's not like there's an
atmosphere above a rocky surface. There's something very dense in
the core. But basically Saturn is just a big ball
(13:30):
of gas and it gets denser and denser as you go.
And we can dig into the structure of Saturn in
a in another episode. But what we're looking at is
basically clouds on Saturn and they rotate, you know, they
move around Saturn, etcetera, etcetera. Um, so we're looking at
this cloud patterns. But the interesting thing about this hexagon
is that it doesn't rotate with respect to Saturn like
it moves with Saturn, and it seems like it's sort
(13:52):
of fixed to Saturn. That is, it rotates the same
rate as the rest of the planet, whereas some of
the cloud bands below it and on Jupiter they can
rotate faster or slower. Yeah. Well, I think one thing
we should mention is that they might help people grasp
this is that the storm is kind of centered around
the north pole of Saturn. Right, that's right. It's like
(14:12):
a hat on Saturn. Yeah, exactly, And there isn't one
on the south pole, right, There's only one on the
north pole. And so that might explain a little bit
why it's so symmetrical, Right, It's it's sort of like
it's it's centered around the whole spinning of the planet. Yeah,
that might be the one thing about it that makes
any sense, Right, that the center of the hexagon is
the north pole of Saturn. It would be even weirder
if it was like offset somehow. Do you think maybe
(14:35):
it's like Saturn and Jupiter having a little competition, you know,
Jupiter is like, hey, look I got a red tattoo,
and Santa's like, oh, yeah, well I got a little
blue hexagon. That's definitely the most likely explanation for sure. Yeah,
and I'm I'm just wondering what the Jupiter is going
to come up with. The one up Saturn is hexagon, right,
another eye, Jupiter did absorb a comet that was pretty spectacular.
So it's huge, this storm. And so what makes it
(14:58):
a storm as opposed to the whole planet, which is
sort of like a giant cloud. Yeah, that's a great question.
What makes this storm? I think the whole planet is
basically a storm, you know, and this is just one
part of it. Um. These clouds are moving at pretty
high speed, and so I guess that's what you would
call a storm. Um. And that's fascinating also because you know,
we see these things on gas giants, these persistent patterns
(15:19):
of clouds we call them storms. But here on Earth
storms don't last years or decades or centuries. Right. The
great red spot in Jupiter is like at least a
century old. This thing on Saturn, we have no idea
how long it's been there. We saw it first in
one but on Earth, like I looked it up the
longest recorded storm ever on Earth was like thirty one days.
(15:40):
So there's something that's like stable and weird about these
cloud patterns on the gas giants that just doesn't happen
here on Earth. It might just be kind of a
skill thing, right, I mean, Jupiter and Saturn are so
much bigger than the Earth. Yeah, that certainly could be it.
And that's why I think it's so fascinating to look
at the atmospheres of other planets because we never see
that kind of thing here on Earth because the particular
their details of Earth. As you say, it's a particular size,
(16:03):
and so we don't get to see like what weird
effects only happen when you have a planet that's like
a thousand times bigger, and that's why it's so fascinating.
But you know, you look at it and then you
have to ask the question, like, how is it possible?
What's the physics there? Can we understand it? We certainly
didn't predict it. Nobody before we saw it said I
call out that there's going to be a hexagon on
top of Saturn. Wow, that would have been impressive. Nobody
(16:24):
predicted it. But in theory it should be explainable. Right,
everything we see out there in the universe should have
a natural physical explanation. Then the game is, can we
put together a story that tells us why that happens
there and why it doesn't happen anywhere else? Right, And
the weird thing is that it's sort of a different
color than the rest of the planet. Right, It's almost
like the whole planet is gas and clouds, but there's
(16:46):
this one group of clouds. It's a different color, and
it's in the shape of a hexagon. Yeah, what color
would you say it is? I think it's sort of
blue green? Yeah, I would agree. I think the aliens
have great taste, better than the jew Jupiterranyan aliens, whatever
you can say that Jovian sorry, Jovian aliens. Yeah, yeah, no,
it's it's a pretty pretty color. As far as we
(17:08):
know from sort of symbol probes that we've done, it
goes about sixty miles deep, right, so it's not just
on the very top of the cloud layers. It's really
in there. And more recently they did a fly by
and um and they found something really fascinating that the
clouds above this, uh, this hexagon, so sort of in
the very center and above it there's another hexagon. It's
(17:29):
like a vortex in the very high atmosphere above it,
not in the center of the hexagon. There's the vortex
there as well, but well above the hexagon there's another
vortex and that one is also hexagon shape. Wow, and
it's centered. I mean it's in the north pole of
the planet as well. Yeah, it's sort of above the
north pole. It's like as if, you know, you found
some weird hexagonal ocean currents in the north pole of Earth,
(17:53):
and then above it you found hexagonal clouds or something.
There's two layers to this hexagon, and this, the second part,
was only recently discovered. So that's pretty wild to have
such a huge thing, such a huge storm, and have
it be a very specific shape. Yeah. I think, um,
the fact that there are two hexagons totally supports your
massive glowing hexagon alien crystal on the top of Saturn. Well,
(18:16):
let's get into that. Let's get into what scientists think
might be causing this feature in our solar system and
what we don't know about it. But first let's take
a quick break. All right, we're talking about Saturn's hexagon,
(18:42):
and so this was I was impressed by this. This
was only recently discovered, right Daniel in Yeah, voyager flu
by Saturn and you know took some of the first
close up pictures. And I would have loved to have
been in the control room when that first picture got downloaded.
You know, this is one and this is pictures some voyager,
So it was sort of like downloading pictures from the internet,
(19:02):
you know twenty years ago. You get like a line
at a time, you're like waiting for it to come across,
and it must have been like slowly revealed. And what's
it like to be in the control room when such
a bizarre thing comes onto your screen for the first
time ever? Um, it must have been a wonderful moment. Yeah,
do you think they were They were going like, oh
my god, Alien. I think they're probably finding the grad
(19:24):
students to me like, this is not an appropriate prank
to play. Okay. I know you think this is funny,
but making a fake hexagon in the data is not okay. Um,
they must have really doubted their results for the first
a few minutes because it's just crazy. So before we
couldn't see it. Before we even with our telescopes, we
couldn't make out this hexagon. That's right. Yeah, we just
didn't have close up enough pictures of Saturn to see
(19:46):
this thing. And also it's on the north pole, so
it's harder to see from our angle. It's easier to
see from above, right, And so what you need is
a satellite, you know, to fly by Saturn and to
see it. And Saturn of course a gorgeous planet. Anyway,
you want closer pictures of the ings and the clouds
an incredible thing. Um, but then this hexagon is just
so baffling. Well, it seems that Saturn is definitely winning
(20:07):
the one upmanship with the Jupiter. I mean, it's got
the rings, got the hexagon. Don't let the Jovians hear
you say that, man. So, so let's get into what
might be causing this weird hexagonal pattern in Saturn. Right,
If it's not aliens, what could it possibly be. Yeah, so, um,
here's my list of possible explanations. One aliens, that's the
(20:32):
whole list. Is this in an order of preference or
or a wish fulfillment, that's the whole list. Of the
order doesn't matter. Um, we have no other consensus explanation.
I mean, they're really just there's nobody who knows what
could be making this thing. There are some folks who
have done some some studies to say, maybe it's some
(20:53):
weird thing with fluid hydrodynamics and cloud shapes and all
sorts of stuff interacting with like magnetic fields and and
all sorts of other stuff. But nobody can reproduce this.
I mean, if it's a something that needs to be
that size, which is why you don't see it on earth,
then of course you're not gonna be able to make
it in the lab. And there are some people who
have done some stuff, like they put liquid in a
(21:13):
vat and they spin it and they try to see,
can we see any weird shapes in the spinning liquid
and we make stables shapes and the spinning liquid or
spinning gas, and you know, they see some things, but
nobody is really convinced by it. So what do you mean,
like not even you can't even simulate this pattern. There's
no explanation in the sense that we have no experiments
they can reproduce it, and not even simulations that can
(21:35):
that can construct this. And you know those simulations are
not easy to do, right. You need a vast, vast
system you're simulating lots and lots of particles, um, so
it would be a lot of computation. There might be
some really clever ways to sort of model the whole system.
But you're looking for this this thing to emerge, right,
You can't like put the hexagon into your calculations. You
want the hexagon to emerge naturally to show how it
(21:58):
can be produced, So you have to model it from
sort of a low level, like model all the particles
bouncing around and showed that this comes out. And that's
pretty tough. Couldn't you assume the hexagonal shape and then
kind of try to guess what kinds of forces or
processes you would need to get that shape. Yeah, and
people have thought about that, you know, like could there
be maybe vortices on the outside of it, Like imagine
(22:20):
a circle, and then if you happen to have six
regularly spaced vortices or clouds on the outside of it
that are sort of drawn towards the north pole, they
might be exerting pressure on those sides and bending them
from a circle into sort of straighter lines. That's one
sort of idea, but there's there's no real support for that,
Like nobody has shown that that works in simulation. I
(22:41):
think it must be on a list of you know,
astrophysics projects. People are like, well, somebody's got to explain that,
but nobody knows how to get started, so we just
sort of keep it on the list of big questions
until somebody comes along with a good idea and it's
been defers like, you do it, no, you do it,
I don't want to do it. But there are a
lot of great stories like that in science, or there's
sort an open puzzle for decades and nobody really knows
(23:02):
how to approach, and then somebody finally comes along and says, okay,
I'm making that my PhD topic, and they dive in
and sometimes they figure it out, and those that's wonderful.
You know, that's wonderful. I'm glad that we have these
big hanging questions out there for people to dive into.
I don't want people to think that most of the
universe is figured out or explained or theren't. They aren't immediate,
tangible questions to be answered. So this is a pretty
(23:24):
big one. So there could be somebody listening to us
right now thinking, hey, maybe I'll be the one to
crack this mystery. Yeah, and it could be that somebody
listening to this right now is the person that cracks
this mystery. And when you figure it out and you
discover the aliens, hey mention my name to them. I
know this guy who's a huge fan. I did a
bunch of digging to try to figure out what do
(23:45):
people think about hexagon? Like what do the experts think
about it? There really isn't a lot out there, and
so because it's a pretty third of thin amount of
stuff to read, you end up pretty quickly out in
the weeds. And I watched a lot of videos of
people analyzing this picture and basically concluding that they were aliens.
That's why you were telling me you were looking at
this um really reputable academic source YouTube, that's right. On YouTube,
(24:09):
you can find lots of videos of people pouring over
this pictures of the hexagon, being like, look, this is
a city. See here you can see a dome, and
this must be a road and whatever. Um, A lot
of people are convinced that there's it's a huge alien
megastructure and that NASA is somehow covering it up. Well,
what are they seeing in the pattern that maybe scientists
are not, or they think that scientists are not. I
(24:30):
don't know what they're seeing because I looked through these
patterns also, and it just looks like clouds to me. Um.
I think they must have been smoking some pretty good
banana peals to make those conclusions. You know, it's sort
of like a roor shock test, like you know, you
see what you want to see. Use zooming on those
clouds and the inside of the this is in the
inside of the hexagon. Zoom in on those clouds and
you can see whatever you want. But it really is weird, right,
(24:54):
Like it it's weird for anything natural to be just
going a straight line like that and then take regular
turns in one direction. Yeah, exactly, it's really weird. I
think that's the weirdest part for me. Are those turns?
You know, how does that happen? How does like a
huge high speed band of clouds bend like that? You know,
it's usually it's if it encounters an obstacle or something, um,
(25:17):
which would suggest you know, there's something underneath it that's
that's causing it. Uh, we really don't know. I was
thinking about, you know, temperature gradients, like maybe the reason
there are large storms on gas giants is because they're
sort of further out from the Sun, which makes the
tops of them cold. Right, the outer atmosphere is colder
because it's further from the Sun, but then the interior
(25:39):
is very hot. So maybe they're just like larger temperature gradients.
Like the difference between the cloud tops and the center
is huge, and that's that's the kind of stuff that
causes weather here on Earth, right, cold air meeting hot air. Yeah,
there's definitely something strange about these gas giants, right, like
Saturn and Jupiter that are basically just giant balls of
gas that there's a lot of like physics that we
(25:59):
don't really we understand when you when you have that
munch of gas, that's right, you don't know. There's a
lot of a lot of good jokes that that I'm
just going to step right around because this is a
family friendly episode, Um, but exactly, and that's why we
want to study it. You know, we are looking at
planets outside our Solar system, and we're just soon going
to be getting images of those for the first time,
(26:21):
and we're gonna be seeing even stranger weather patterns, I hope,
and one day we'll be we'll be looking at those
to decide where should we go? Where should humanities next
home be? And we want to pick a place that's
nice to live on, right, we want to find another
key West. And so it's good to get experienced just
in our neighborhood looking at planets and saying do we
understand this weather? Can? We had to figure this out.
(26:42):
The more we understand about exoplanet atmospheres, the better will
be in choosing a place for humanity to survive. So
it's kind of like Stonehenge in a way, right, Like
it's like it's like the Stonehenge of Saturn. It's like
it's there. It's obviously shouldn't be there, and it's weird
that it's there, but there's no real physical explanation for
why it's there. Yeah, that's a good analogy. It's like
(27:03):
a massive Saturnian Stonehenge. So basically the Irish did it.
And I think, um, a lot of people thought Stonehee
was also built by aliens, didn't they? Oh, well maybe
it's all related Stonehenge a hexagon. Oh my god, we
cracked the code. Did we just solve two mysteries? We
just cracked the code? All right? This is turning into
(27:26):
a Dan Brown novel. So yeah, so there are interesting
and amazing mysteries out there, even in our solar system
that even physicists are flabbergasted about gassing their flabbers flabberries
are gasting. And so it's right there for you guys,
out there, for future scientists to try to figure it out.
That's right. So next time you're outside in the night sky,
(27:47):
look up and remember there's weird stuff going on really
far away, but also right here close to home. They're
big mysteries and little mysteries and six sided mysteries for
you to solve. Enjoy the view and all of some
of those mysteries for us, because I am dying to
know what's going on. Daniel is dying to meet some
that's right. That's right, and trade all of your lives
(28:08):
for some secrets of the universe. Alright, Well, on that note,
see you next time. Thanks for tuning in. If you
still have a question after listening to all these explanations,
please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
(28:30):
You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio from More podcast from
my heart Radio. Visit the I Heart Radio Apple Apple Podcasts,
(28:50):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, Daniel, if aliens arrived to our solar system, do
you think they would know that we were here on
Earth before they landed? Like, could they tell from far away? Well,
I don't know. You think they're broadcasting episodes of our podcast.
Maybe they'd hear one. I'm not sure they would conclude
that we're that intelligent if they got this podcast, but well,
they'd hear that we love asking questions. I don't know.
(00:29):
I guess if they know they can't close enough to
Earth to see the surface but not see people, they
could probably see all sorts of weird geometric structures, you know,
circles from farming and cities and grids and stuff that
you just don't see in nature, like straight lines and
squares and perfect circles. Yeah, the kind of stuff you
don't see like coming naturally out of a forest or
some totally wild environment, like like a holiday in from
(00:51):
above exactly, Well, you don't see spontaneous holiday inns farming
in jungles. Right. Hi. I'm Morey. I'm a cartoonist and
(01:14):
the creator of PhD Comics. And I'm Daniel. I'm a
particle physicist, and I like asking questions about the universe.
Wondering about weird stuff and planning to collaborate with other
species against the for the downfall of humanity. And that's
perfect because I like drawing aliens and question marks. That's right.
That's why we make such a great team. Exactly. I
commit the crimes and you draw them, but I make
(01:35):
them funny and with sound effects. That's right. At my
trial for treason against humanity, I want you to be
the sort of court reporter that's drawing me sympathetically. Oh yeah,
I'll be there. I'll be drawing the mental map of
your guilty argumentation. But before that, you can see a
sample of our work because we wrote a book together
about questions about the universe. It's called We Have No Idea,
(01:57):
A Guide to the Unknown Universe. Yeah. It's full of awesome,
interesting questions about the universe and also cartoons, so check
it out. That's right. But today you're listening to our podcast,
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I
Heart Radio. That's right, And here's where we sit down
and chew on one particular question. Every episode, we try
to find something weird, something strange, something that you'd like
(02:20):
to hear discussed in more depth than you can just
google and break it down for you. Yeah, all kinds
of weird things out there in the universe and other
planets in the smallest of scales, things that are circular, square, spinning,
maybe even hexagonal. That's right. We like all kinds of questions,
two sided, four sided, even six sided questions. So today
on the podcast, we'll be talking about a pretty interesting
(02:43):
mystery right here in our solar system. I think even
pretty interesting is under selling it. I think it's flabbergasting.
When I first heard about this, I thought, whoa, that's
probably aliens. You were flabbergasted, That's right. All of my
flabbers were totally gasted by this concept. I don't even
know what that means, but it sounds like you're amazed.
(03:05):
I don't know. I'm trying to reduce the number of
flappers I have, actually, um as I get older. But yeah,
this is the kind of thing that it's sort of
a modern question because it's the kind of question that arises. Um.
The more we can see things, you know, the more
we look out into the universe, the more we see
stuff that we didn't expect, which is exactly why we
do look out into the universe to get those surprises. Yeah,
(03:27):
to get more data points about how the universe works, right,
because so far we can only mostly look around where
we are here on Earth. That's right. And I think
early humans thought, hey, look, this is the Earth, this
is the universe. Everything else is just details or supporting
cast right. And as we learn more and more about
our role in the universe, we learned that the universe
is huge. And but you might be tempted to do
(03:47):
extrapolate and said, well, maybe the rest of the universe
is just filled with Earth's also, right. But the more
we look out, the more we learn that the Earth
is weird, it's strange, it's it's unusual. There are just
in our Solar system. There are no other plan It's
like the Earth. Yeah, it's strangely not hexagonal. That's right.
That's right. So maybe you should stop teasing folks and
tell them exactly what we're talking about today. Yeah, So
(04:11):
to be on the program, we'll be talking a really
big mystery in our solar system. We'll be talking about
what is Saturn's hexagon? That's right. And you might be thinking,
what Saturn has a hexagon? What does that even mean?
Does they have like a toy it plays with or something. Yeah.
I mean, I have to admit I had no idea
(04:32):
what this was before you send me the notes for
this episode. Yeah, well it's incredible. I mean I thought
Saturn had like an octagon or a you know, pentagon,
but not a hexagon. That sounds somehow more sinister, right,
Like octagon and pentagon sound like they involved in some
devious scheme or something. But a hexagon, I guess the
hexagon is more benign. Yeah, I think so. I mean,
(04:53):
there's something nice about the number six. But I love
this topic and we'll dig into the details of it.
Sort of. The broader sense of it is is learning
about the other stuff that goes out there, you know,
like the more we discover other planets and and other
systems and more we learn that stuff here on Earth
is kind of I don't know, sedate, you know, like
the biggest mountains in the Solar System not here on Earth,
(05:14):
the highest temperatures in the Solar System, not here on Earth,
the deepest valleys not here on Earth. Right, the weirdest
stuff in the Solar System is not here, And our
things here on Earth are kind of I don't know,
calm and and uh and easy going compared to the
extremes we find elsewhere in the just in our solar system.
You're saying, Earth is like the key west of the
solar system, you know, calm weather. Yeah, exactly. Imagine you
(05:36):
were a civilization that like, you know, formed in in
the southern Florida or something where along the equator, and
you imagine the whole Earth was like that, and then
you traveled north and like learned about snow and stuff
like that. You be like, whoa, this is crazy. Why
do people even live here? That's what I think of
the North All. That's when I think of every time
(05:56):
I go to Chicago, I'm like, I love this town,
but why is it here? Seriously, Like this town should
be on the west coast. So yeah, So Saturn has
a hexagon. And so if you've never heard of this before,
and you are a at a computer maybe or on
your phone on the subway or or the or the train, um,
just take a second and just google image. Google search
for Saturn hexagon. I think your mind will be blown
(06:19):
when you see the images that come up. That's right,
all of your flabbers will be gassed. And for those
of you who don't have a screen in front of you,
and and we don't want you to pick up your
phone and while you're driving and start typing this into Google.
We can describe it for you briefly. Basically, if you
look at the top of Saturn, there is an enormous
cloud pattern in the shape of a hexagon. And it's
(06:40):
not like, no, that's not really hexagon. I mean you
look at this thing and you think, whoa, that's a hexagon.
It's a storm, and it looks at different color than
the rest of the planet, and the outline of it
looks like a perfect hexagon. It's not like a weird
blob with six sides of different sizes. It's like a
perfect hexagon. Yeah, I think perfect. My stretching it a
(07:00):
little bit, but it's definitely hexagonal. Right, It's not like
a circle with suggestions a little hint of hexagons. It's
like a slightly rounded hexagon. It's it's pretty strange and
it's big. It's sort of it's sort of like a
hat on Saturn, right, Yeah, exactly. This is not a
small thing. I think it sort of looks like a
yarmu cut, a six sided yamica. Yeah, that's right, you know,
(07:22):
like the six pointed star. Maybe Saturn is a Jewish
Planet's Jewish? Yeah? Maybe? Yeah, it's the Holy Land after all.
And you know, the amazing thing about this is that
we've never seen anything that shape before. And when we
looked all around Earth and storms on Earth, you know,
they're like round usually or a round dish, right, And
we looked all over the Solar System. You know, Jupiter
(07:44):
has storms on it and they're circular or they're like
a little oblong or whatever. We've never seen something on
another planet that's a geometrical shape. The only things we've
ever seen that are hexagonal are here on Earth and
their civilization, you know, unless you're talking about like bees,
honeycombs and stuff, and that's still that's proof of life.
It's a pretty suspicious thing, right, isn't it. It's not
(08:04):
round like or a blob. It's it's like it looks
like it has six sides to it. Yeah, it looks constructed.
And so immediately your brain goes to like, oh my god,
are there aliens on Saturn? Right? And then you think, okay,
I have to come up with some other explanation, because
you know, the alien explanation wild antilizing, and while I
always want to go there because I'm desperate to meet
these aliens, it's got to be low on the list. Right.
(08:26):
If there were aliens on Saturn, they were capable of
doing this kind of thing, we probably would have heard
from them before now. So you've got to think of
some other explanation for it. But we'll dig into that. Well,
this is a perfect point to take a break, Daniel.
(08:51):
I feel like, if you ever meet aliens or gonna
be like the super eager person that really wants to,
I'm totally gonna fanboy out about the one thing. Yeah, family,
you're like, how did you get here? I love your work,
by the way, I'm so impressed. No, I'm gonna be shameless,
Absolutely absolutely. I will fanboard those alien physicists for sure. Well,
(09:13):
I definitely want their autograph as well. But before we
dig into it, I thought, what do people know about it?
Do people even know that this is a thing? Um?
So I ran around campus that you see Irvine, and
I asked folks if they knew that Saturn had a
hexagon on it. Here's what people had to say, did
you know that Saturn has a storm on it that's
almost a perfect hexagon. No, I did not. Do you
(09:33):
have any explanation for that? Does that seem natural to you?
Definitely not natural? I mean it is natural, but it
doesn't sound natural. I'm not sure because like there's things
in nature that are like hexagons, right, like honeycombs, like
can be artificial, artificial. So you think, like Aliens made
a storm on Saturn? What do you think? I think
(09:55):
Aliens is a stretch, but maybe I don't know. I
feel like it could be natural since we've never really
explored I'm not sure, but maybe exists. Okay, So you
don't think it's Aliens. Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah,
because I feel like there's different types, like gravity on
Earth is different than any other planet. I really thought
(10:16):
of that. I feel like that might be an artificial
thing based on precedence on Earth, so most things are circular,
so something that would be hexagonal would suggest that there's
many fronts converging on one one site to control the flow.
I can't believe that it would be natural. And the
thing that I think of is, uh, the organization of
(10:40):
spatial representation in the end torontal cortex of the mammalian
brain the grid cells. Most people say no, but then
you actually showed them a picture of it, right, that's right.
I showed them a picture and then I said, so
what do you think does this seem like something that
could be, you know, naturally occurring or is it evidence
of aliens? Does it look artificial? So that's that was
(11:00):
maybe the more interesting question. And you know, some people
were like, well, it's definitely not natural. Well it doesn't
sound natural. I mean, how could that be possible? A
lot of people went straight to aliens though, you know,
some people had some ideas. What kinds of ideas did
people have? Well a lot of people thought, you know,
artificial though maybe I was planning that idea in their heads,
you never know. Um, But some people pointed out, you know,
(11:20):
like bees and honeycombs, that there are some things in
nature that are naturally hexagonal. But those things, again, that's life, right,
They're not inorganic things you find that are hexagonal. And
I thought somebody who was going to say, well, you know,
maybe crystals, right, because you can get naturally forming crystals
that are squares or totally geometric shapes, though certainly not
(11:40):
the size of this thing on Saturn. Well, we haven't
seen one before. And anyway, this is a cloud pattern, right,
not not a crystal. So you do see some hexagons
in nature sometimes, Okay, it's not kind of like a
fractals thing, Like maybe there's something small hexagonal that comes
out as a huge hexagonal storm. That would be awesome. Mean,
if there's some amazing crystal at the center of this
(12:02):
storm that's shaping the whole thing, I love it. Let's
go to Saturn and figure it out. I'm gonna drop
you into the center of that storm to retrieve that crystal.
That sounds like a great movie, doesn't it. Saturn's hexagon.
Retrieving Saturny's the race for Saturn's hexagon. So let's let's
dig into it. Then let's talk about what we do
know and don't know about this weird, almost artificial looking
(12:25):
feature on Saturday. I think the most important thing to
understand is the scale of this thing. This is not
like a hexagon the size of a school bus or
even a small town, or even like you know, North America,
or even the Earth. Okay, each side of this hexagon
is the size of the Earth, which makes the whole thing.
(12:46):
It's twenty thousand miles wide. So imagine a storm that
was in the shape of a hexagon, and each side
of that storm is bigger than the Earth. It's unbelievable.
It's bigger than the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. So
it's a giant storm. And for a whole length of
the of an Earth, it's it has a straight edge, yeah,
and then it bends right. The straight edge is weird,
(13:08):
and then it bends. It bends six degrees and then
it goes straight again for another length of the Earth,
and and it does at six times. And for people
who aren't familiar with Saturn, remember Saturn is a gas planet,
which means that the outer layers of Saturn are just
this hot, dense gas. Right, It's not like there's an
atmosphere above a rocky surface. There's something very dense in
the core. But basically Saturn is just a big ball
(13:30):
of gas and it gets denser and denser as you go.
And we can dig into the structure of Saturn in
a in another episode. But what we're looking at is
basically clouds on Saturn and they rotate, you know, they
move around Saturn, etcetera, etcetera. Um, so we're looking at
this cloud patterns. But the interesting thing about this hexagon
is that it doesn't rotate with respect to Saturn like
it moves with Saturn, and it seems like it's sort
(13:52):
of fixed to Saturn. That is, it rotates the same
rate as the rest of the planet, whereas some of
the cloud bands below it and on Jupiter they can
rotate faster or slower. Yeah. Well, I think one thing
we should mention is that they might help people grasp
this is that the storm is kind of centered around
the north pole of Saturn. Right, that's right. It's like
(14:12):
a hat on Saturn. Yeah, exactly, And there isn't one
on the south pole, right, There's only one on the
north pole. And so that might explain a little bit
why it's so symmetrical, Right, It's it's sort of like
it's it's centered around the whole spinning of the planet. Yeah,
that might be the one thing about it that makes
any sense, Right, that the center of the hexagon is
the north pole of Saturn. It would be even weirder
if it was like offset somehow. Do you think maybe
(14:35):
it's like Saturn and Jupiter having a little competition, you know,
Jupiter is like, hey, look I got a red tattoo,
and Santa's like, oh, yeah, well I got a little
blue hexagon. That's definitely the most likely explanation for sure. Yeah,
and I'm I'm just wondering what the Jupiter is going
to come up with. The one up Saturn is hexagon, right,
another eye, Jupiter did absorb a comet that was pretty spectacular.
So it's huge, this storm. And so what makes it
(14:58):
a storm as opposed to the whole planet, which is
sort of like a giant cloud. Yeah, that's a great question.
What makes this storm? I think the whole planet is
basically a storm, you know, and this is just one
part of it. Um. These clouds are moving at pretty
high speed, and so I guess that's what you would
call a storm. Um. And that's fascinating also because you know,
we see these things on gas giants, these persistent patterns
(15:19):
of clouds we call them storms. But here on Earth
storms don't last years or decades or centuries. Right. The
great red spot in Jupiter is like at least a
century old. This thing on Saturn, we have no idea
how long it's been there. We saw it first in
one but on Earth, like I looked it up the
longest recorded storm ever on Earth was like thirty one days.
(15:40):
So there's something that's like stable and weird about these
cloud patterns on the gas giants that just doesn't happen
here on Earth. It might just be kind of a
skill thing, right, I mean, Jupiter and Saturn are so
much bigger than the Earth. Yeah, that certainly could be it.
And that's why I think it's so fascinating to look
at the atmospheres of other planets because we never see
that kind of thing here on Earth because the particular
their details of Earth. As you say, it's a particular size,
(16:03):
and so we don't get to see like what weird
effects only happen when you have a planet that's like
a thousand times bigger, and that's why it's so fascinating.
But you know, you look at it and then you
have to ask the question, like, how is it possible?
What's the physics there? Can we understand it? We certainly
didn't predict it. Nobody before we saw it said I
call out that there's going to be a hexagon on
top of Saturn. Wow, that would have been impressive. Nobody
(16:24):
predicted it. But in theory it should be explainable. Right,
everything we see out there in the universe should have
a natural physical explanation. Then the game is, can we
put together a story that tells us why that happens
there and why it doesn't happen anywhere else? Right, And
the weird thing is that it's sort of a different
color than the rest of the planet. Right, It's almost
like the whole planet is gas and clouds, but there's
(16:46):
this one group of clouds. It's a different color, and
it's in the shape of a hexagon. Yeah, what color
would you say it is? I think it's sort of
blue green? Yeah, I would agree. I think the aliens
have great taste, better than the jew Jupiterranyan aliens, whatever
you can say that Jovian sorry, Jovian aliens. Yeah, yeah, no,
it's it's a pretty pretty color. As far as we
(17:08):
know from sort of symbol probes that we've done, it
goes about sixty miles deep, right, so it's not just
on the very top of the cloud layers. It's really
in there. And more recently they did a fly by
and um and they found something really fascinating that the
clouds above this, uh, this hexagon, so sort of in
the very center and above it there's another hexagon. It's
(17:29):
like a vortex in the very high atmosphere above it,
not in the center of the hexagon. There's the vortex
there as well, but well above the hexagon there's another
vortex and that one is also hexagon shape. Wow, and
it's centered. I mean it's in the north pole of
the planet as well. Yeah, it's sort of above the
north pole. It's like as if, you know, you found
some weird hexagonal ocean currents in the north pole of Earth,
(17:53):
and then above it you found hexagonal clouds or something.
There's two layers to this hexagon, and this, the second part,
was only recently discovered. So that's pretty wild to have
such a huge thing, such a huge storm, and have
it be a very specific shape. Yeah. I think, um,
the fact that there are two hexagons totally supports your
massive glowing hexagon alien crystal on the top of Saturn. Well,
(18:16):
let's get into that. Let's get into what scientists think
might be causing this feature in our solar system and
what we don't know about it. But first let's take
a quick break. All right, we're talking about Saturn's hexagon,
(18:42):
and so this was I was impressed by this. This
was only recently discovered, right Daniel in Yeah, voyager flu
by Saturn and you know took some of the first
close up pictures. And I would have loved to have
been in the control room when that first picture got downloaded.
You know, this is one and this is pictures some voyager,
So it was sort of like downloading pictures from the internet,
(19:02):
you know twenty years ago. You get like a line
at a time, you're like waiting for it to come across,
and it must have been like slowly revealed. And what's
it like to be in the control room when such
a bizarre thing comes onto your screen for the first
time ever? Um, it must have been a wonderful moment. Yeah,
do you think they were They were going like, oh
my god, Alien. I think they're probably finding the grad
(19:24):
students to me like, this is not an appropriate prank
to play. Okay. I know you think this is funny,
but making a fake hexagon in the data is not okay. Um,
they must have really doubted their results for the first
a few minutes because it's just crazy. So before we
couldn't see it. Before we even with our telescopes, we
couldn't make out this hexagon. That's right. Yeah, we just
didn't have close up enough pictures of Saturn to see
(19:46):
this thing. And also it's on the north pole, so
it's harder to see from our angle. It's easier to
see from above, right, And so what you need is
a satellite, you know, to fly by Saturn and to
see it. And Saturn of course a gorgeous planet. Anyway,
you want closer pictures of the ings and the clouds
an incredible thing. Um, but then this hexagon is just
so baffling. Well, it seems that Saturn is definitely winning
(20:07):
the one upmanship with the Jupiter. I mean, it's got
the rings, got the hexagon. Don't let the Jovians hear
you say that, man. So, so let's get into what
might be causing this weird hexagonal pattern in Saturn. Right,
If it's not aliens, what could it possibly be. Yeah, so, um,
here's my list of possible explanations. One aliens, that's the
(20:32):
whole list. Is this in an order of preference or
or a wish fulfillment, that's the whole list. Of the
order doesn't matter. Um, we have no other consensus explanation.
I mean, they're really just there's nobody who knows what
could be making this thing. There are some folks who
have done some some studies to say, maybe it's some
(20:53):
weird thing with fluid hydrodynamics and cloud shapes and all
sorts of stuff interacting with like magnetic fields and and
all sorts of other stuff. But nobody can reproduce this.
I mean, if it's a something that needs to be
that size, which is why you don't see it on earth,
then of course you're not gonna be able to make
it in the lab. And there are some people who
have done some stuff, like they put liquid in a
(21:13):
vat and they spin it and they try to see,
can we see any weird shapes in the spinning liquid
and we make stables shapes and the spinning liquid or
spinning gas, and you know, they see some things, but
nobody is really convinced by it. So what do you mean,
like not even you can't even simulate this pattern. There's
no explanation in the sense that we have no experiments
they can reproduce it, and not even simulations that can
(21:35):
that can construct this. And you know those simulations are
not easy to do, right. You need a vast, vast
system you're simulating lots and lots of particles, um, so
it would be a lot of computation. There might be
some really clever ways to sort of model the whole system.
But you're looking for this this thing to emerge, right,
You can't like put the hexagon into your calculations. You
want the hexagon to emerge naturally to show how it
(21:58):
can be produced, So you have to model it from
sort of a low level, like model all the particles
bouncing around and showed that this comes out. And that's
pretty tough. Couldn't you assume the hexagonal shape and then
kind of try to guess what kinds of forces or
processes you would need to get that shape. Yeah, and
people have thought about that, you know, like could there
be maybe vortices on the outside of it, Like imagine
(22:20):
a circle, and then if you happen to have six
regularly spaced vortices or clouds on the outside of it
that are sort of drawn towards the north pole, they
might be exerting pressure on those sides and bending them
from a circle into sort of straighter lines. That's one
sort of idea, but there's there's no real support for that,
Like nobody has shown that that works in simulation. I
(22:41):
think it must be on a list of you know,
astrophysics projects. People are like, well, somebody's got to explain that,
but nobody knows how to get started, so we just
sort of keep it on the list of big questions
until somebody comes along with a good idea and it's
been defers like, you do it, no, you do it,
I don't want to do it. But there are a
lot of great stories like that in science, or there's
sort an open puzzle for decades and nobody really knows
(23:02):
how to approach, and then somebody finally comes along and says, okay,
I'm making that my PhD topic, and they dive in
and sometimes they figure it out, and those that's wonderful.
You know, that's wonderful. I'm glad that we have these
big hanging questions out there for people to dive into.
I don't want people to think that most of the
universe is figured out or explained or theren't. They aren't immediate,
tangible questions to be answered. So this is a pretty
(23:24):
big one. So there could be somebody listening to us
right now thinking, hey, maybe I'll be the one to
crack this mystery. Yeah, and it could be that somebody
listening to this right now is the person that cracks
this mystery. And when you figure it out and you
discover the aliens, hey mention my name to them. I
know this guy who's a huge fan. I did a
bunch of digging to try to figure out what do
(23:45):
people think about hexagon? Like what do the experts think
about it? There really isn't a lot out there, and
so because it's a pretty third of thin amount of
stuff to read, you end up pretty quickly out in
the weeds. And I watched a lot of videos of
people analyzing this picture and basically concluding that they were aliens.
That's why you were telling me you were looking at
this um really reputable academic source YouTube, that's right. On YouTube,
(24:09):
you can find lots of videos of people pouring over
this pictures of the hexagon, being like, look, this is
a city. See here you can see a dome, and
this must be a road and whatever. Um, A lot
of people are convinced that there's it's a huge alien
megastructure and that NASA is somehow covering it up. Well,
what are they seeing in the pattern that maybe scientists
are not, or they think that scientists are not. I
(24:30):
don't know what they're seeing because I looked through these
patterns also, and it just looks like clouds to me. Um.
I think they must have been smoking some pretty good
banana peals to make those conclusions. You know, it's sort
of like a roor shock test, like you know, you
see what you want to see. Use zooming on those
clouds and the inside of the this is in the
inside of the hexagon. Zoom in on those clouds and
you can see whatever you want. But it really is weird, right,
(24:54):
Like it it's weird for anything natural to be just
going a straight line like that and then take regular
turns in one direction. Yeah, exactly, it's really weird. I
think that's the weirdest part for me. Are those turns?
You know, how does that happen? How does like a
huge high speed band of clouds bend like that? You know,
it's usually it's if it encounters an obstacle or something, um,
(25:17):
which would suggest you know, there's something underneath it that's
that's causing it. Uh, we really don't know. I was
thinking about, you know, temperature gradients, like maybe the reason
there are large storms on gas giants is because they're
sort of further out from the Sun, which makes the
tops of them cold. Right, the outer atmosphere is colder
because it's further from the Sun, but then the interior
(25:39):
is very hot. So maybe they're just like larger temperature gradients.
Like the difference between the cloud tops and the center
is huge, and that's that's the kind of stuff that
causes weather here on Earth, right, cold air meeting hot air. Yeah,
there's definitely something strange about these gas giants, right, like
Saturn and Jupiter that are basically just giant balls of
gas that there's a lot of like physics that we
(25:59):
don't really we understand when you when you have that
munch of gas, that's right, you don't know. There's a
lot of a lot of good jokes that that I'm
just going to step right around because this is a
family friendly episode, Um, but exactly, and that's why we
want to study it. You know, we are looking at
planets outside our Solar system, and we're just soon going
to be getting images of those for the first time,
(26:21):
and we're gonna be seeing even stranger weather patterns, I hope,
and one day we'll be we'll be looking at those
to decide where should we go? Where should humanities next
home be? And we want to pick a place that's
nice to live on, right, we want to find another
key West. And so it's good to get experienced just
in our neighborhood looking at planets and saying do we
understand this weather? Can? We had to figure this out.
(26:42):
The more we understand about exoplanet atmospheres, the better will
be in choosing a place for humanity to survive. So
it's kind of like Stonehenge in a way, right, Like
it's like it's like the Stonehenge of Saturn. It's like
it's there. It's obviously shouldn't be there, and it's weird
that it's there, but there's no real physical explanation for
why it's there. Yeah, that's a good analogy. It's like
(27:03):
a massive Saturnian Stonehenge. So basically the Irish did it.
And I think, um, a lot of people thought Stonehee
was also built by aliens, didn't they? Oh, well maybe
it's all related Stonehenge a hexagon. Oh my god, we
cracked the code. Did we just solve two mysteries? We
just cracked the code? All right? This is turning into
(27:26):
a Dan Brown novel. So yeah, so there are interesting
and amazing mysteries out there, even in our solar system
that even physicists are flabbergasted about gassing their flabbers flabberries
are gasting. And so it's right there for you guys,
out there, for future scientists to try to figure it out.
That's right. So next time you're outside in the night sky,
(27:47):
look up and remember there's weird stuff going on really
far away, but also right here close to home. They're
big mysteries and little mysteries and six sided mysteries for
you to solve. Enjoy the view and all of some
of those mysteries for us, because I am dying to
know what's going on. Daniel is dying to meet some
that's right. That's right, and trade all of your lives
(28:08):
for some secrets of the universe. Alright, Well, on that note,
see you next time. Thanks for tuning in. If you
still have a question after listening to all these explanations,
please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
(28:30):
You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio from More podcast from
my heart Radio. Visit the I Heart Radio Apple Apple Podcasts,
(28:50):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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