Saturn's permacane in false-color. Images: NASA
A "permacane" is the scientific terminology that I just made up to describe giant, violently swirling storms that are fixed in place—like the one that surrounds Saturn's north pole, which also happens to be the best thing that your mortal eyes will gaze upon today.
NASA describes Saturn's newly discovered permacane thusly:
the hurricane's eye is about 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane are traveling 330 mph(150 meters per second). The hurricane swirls inside a large, mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon.
"We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn's hydrogen atmosphere."
It is a massive, permanent hurricane that is locked in place above the pole. Unlike our Earthen hurricanes, it's not drawing its energy from a body of water, which has left the folks at NASA a bit perplexed—the permacane is a mystery indeed. But a mystery that could yield useful information about how hurricanes work here on earth.
NASA says that scientists will be taking a closer look at the permacane, "studying the hurricane to gain insight into hurricanes on Earth, which feed off warm ocean water. Although there is no body of water close to these clouds high in Saturn's atmosphere, learning how these Saturnian storms use water vapor could tell scientists more about how terrestrial hurricanes are generated and sustained."
Permacanes, it turns out, are also quite stunning.