The Hexagon Vortex at Saturn's North Pole - For Jonny and Chris

This 15,000 mile storm cloud is a swirling vortex at the North pole of saturn, where winds can reach speeds of 1,100mph. The menacing image, captured by the Cassini spacecraft, was taken at 361,000km above the cloud through an infrared filter.

The images beamed back to Earth also show how the eye of the storm lies at the centre of Saturn's mysterious Northern hexagon - an apparently persisting cloud pattern that is shaped like a regular hexagon. The straight sides of the northern polar hexagon - which was discovered by the Voyager explorations - are each approximately 8,600miles long; bigger than the diameter of the Earth. The feature does not shift in longitude like the other clouds in the visible atmosphere, and rotates around the north pole, completing one rotation in little over 10.5 hours.

When this storm was first seen, it was during Saturn’s 15-year winter, and the north pole was in darkness. Scientists noticed a hexagonal shape but it was too dark to peer into the eye of the storm and see for sure what it is.  As spring started to creep in in 2009, scientists had been getting many spectacular images of this ringed planet, and this is one of them. The eye of this “hurricane” is exactly at the center of the hexagonal shape which scientists spotted years ago. The hexagonal shape was over 15,000 miles across, while the recent hurricane Sandy was a mere 1,000 miles across, just to give you an idea of scale.

Astronomers think that these storms form the same way on Saturn as they do on Jupiter, by warmer, moist air rising through colder layers of air, making a cyclonic motion of the air. The sheer magnitude of these storms, though, puts any storm on our Earth to shame.  This is not the first time such a storm had been spotted on Jupiter, however. In 2006, the Cassini photographed a storm 2/3 as wide as the entire Earth. That particular storm was the first time ever that astronomers observed eye-wall clouds other than on Earth. Eye-wall clouds are a typical feature of hurricanes in which a bank of clouds towers above a central point. Scientists are unsure about whether these storms on Saturn are permanent or come and go with the seasons, so hopefully we’ll find that out soon.

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. The planet's diameter is about nine times that of Earth and it has about 95 times more mass than earth.

Well, Jonny and Chris, that is about all the knowledge I have about the storm at the north pole. I hope is was of some use to you....The Genie