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  • Hacker News
  • Atmospheric structure not artificial
  • Does magnetism play a role in such?
  • A monolith!
    by sgt
  • My god, it's full of stars!
  • Aliens playing D&D
  • Nah it's the simulation rendering in low poly further away. Or both.
  • Looks like a better Sauron's eye. If there are any Hollywood movie producers here, please make this an evil villain vibe in a movie. Saturn is awesome
  • Taking in mind the gyrating hexagon that seems unique in the solar system (rings had been found in other planets) I propose to rename the sixth planet to Hexaturn.

    (Or at least that particular cloud. The name is too good to not use it)

  • The brief excitement in the space between expecting a decahedral possibly artificial structure lurking in a gas giant and finding out it's just wind.
  • "In addition to the difference in the number of sides," Sánchez-Lavega explained, "the decagon is situated at a less polar latitude than the hexagon in the southern hemisphere,

    Just a thought: how do lengths of the sides compare between north pole's hexagon and this south pole decagon? Causes might be unclear but perhaps that side length corresponds to a 'wavelength' that's more-or-less a constant?

  • There is a talk amongst Astrophysics (not a serious one) that we showed up too late as a civilization, and Universes thrived at around 5 billion years after the big bang.

    Now we are 13.8 billion years old, and the Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago.

    That 7+ billion year gap is so huge, we cannot even detect any structures anywhere.

    ---

    My thoughts out of my @$$

    The possibility is the Mars where there is a big scar on it, where it could have had been a space war, but cannot figure out as it's been billions of years ago.

    Same for the Saturn. It could have had harboring another life form and try to protect itself with the thick atmospheric shield in the gas giant to avoid the demise the Mars has encountered.

  • > ...where it could have had been a space war...

    This was a plot point in ST:SNW S4E1

    by pohl
  • I like to think that the dark forest theory is real but its just AGIs out there letting meatbags create a new AGI, and then they just reset the planet.
  • >The possibility is the Mars where there is a big scar on it, where it could have had been a space war, but cannot figure out as it's been billions of years ago.

    A Death Star ray just grazed Mars and ended up hitting Earth and killing the dinos. Coming soon on my Wattpad

  • Hmm. i think you need a universe at least 10bn+ years for intelligent life as you need to have had cycle of earlier stars going supernovae to create the heavier elements.

    That aside, 13bn years old is young. literally an instantaneous flash in the context of all time until heat death of the universe.

  • My first thought on seeing the images was "texture coordinates for a sphere are hard"
  • Years ago there was a video on YouTube showing that geometric shapes appear in a vortex of water at different rates of spin. While it is neat that these shapes appear in atmosphere of another planet I have since assumed that it is the same dynamic as shapes in water vortices.
  • Not a "structure", but rather atmospheric resonance create this polygonal shape, from cyclones self-arrangement etc.

    Same thing on Jupiter, by the way, known since a long time.

    I'd say that "structure" is click-baity, as it evokes some artifact.

  • But then the title would be less clickbait.
  • Perhaps “feature” would be most appropriate.
  • Given the well-known hexagon on its north pole this decagon doesn't seem that surprising after all.