The Enigma of Saturn's North-Polar Hexagon

Abstract

It has been suggested that the north-polar hexagon found on Saturn is an unusual Rossby wave. If this is to be the case, one must not only explain how a Rossby wave can be hexagonal in shape, albeit with curved corners, but also why it is hexagonal rather than in the form of some other polygon. It is likely that a spectrum of Rossby waves with different amplitudes and wavelengths resulting from the velocity profile of the hexagonal jet is responsible for its shape.

arXiv comment21 Pages, 9 Figures. Expanded and corrected

References in corpus (2)

• Power Spectral Analysis of Jupiter's Clouds and Kinetic Energy from Cassini
• The Zakharov-Kuznetsov Equation as a Two-Dimensional Model for Nonlinear Rossby Waves