What is that? Nobody knows. It was snapped by the Cassini space probe last year and NASA is open to any explanations anyone can come up with. They don't have a clue.
The hexagon-shaped 'feature' was first spotted decades ago on Saturn's north pole and was dismissed as an anomoly, but it hasn't gone away.
We are told that is a 'feature' made up of spiralling gases. But what gas cloud remains in almost the exact same shape for year after year, and manages to hold a straight-edged, near perfect hexagonal shape?
You may remember the dubious claims of buildings, towers and temples existing on The Moon and Mars, and evidenced by careful examination, or interpretation, of photos released by NASA and pored over by enthusiasts. 'The Face On Mars' got plenty of play from the media back in the 1990s, but it was never proven to be anything but rocky outcrops and shadows.
But this, this is something wonderfully unique and genuinely bizarre.
And it's huge. An estimated 25,000km across.
Even the experts can't offer an explanation, even after keeping it all but hidden from the world since the early 1980s, when it was first photographed during a Voyager flyby :
"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 in Pasadena.
"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."
