Close Encounters of the Hexagonal Kind

Endless Thread goes to space! First, host Ben Brock Johnson goes deep on radio signals of unknown origin, with an assist from real-life radio astronomer and Reddit MVP Yvette Cendes, aka, Andromeda321. Then, producer Kalyani Saxena takes Ben down the metaphorical black hole of Saturn's hexagonal storm, a massive vortex twice the width of the Earth that's inspired internet conspiracy theories every bit as unweildy. Show notes: This storm never ends: Saturn’s north pole (Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1s6omur/this_storm_never_ends_saturns_north_pole/) Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn (NASA https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cassini-images-bizarre-hexagon-on-saturn/) Cassini: Saturn's Perplexing Hexagon (NASA https://science.nasa.gov/mission/cassini/science/saturn/hexagon-in-motion/) Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. It was researched and co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Kalyani Saxena, and edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. Episode art credit of NASA. Sponsor message: EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/ENDLESS Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. When Joe Missoula got the Celtics job, Steve Paliuka sat up until 1:00 in the morning, typing him 25 things about leadership. Dr. Sharon Cherben asks what came first on the list. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 0:20Speaker 02

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 0:27Speaker 03

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 0:33Speaker 03

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Try one.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  Mmm.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.

• 0:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 0:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Producer Kalyani Saksana, how much do you love space? And can you give it to me in some sort of space metric?

• 1:06Speaker 05

  I love space as much as, like, four Jupiters.

• 1:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Whoa.

• 1:14Speaker 05

  But I am scared of space as much as 10 Neptunes.

• 1:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow, okay, all right, I like it.

• 1:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  So we are here to talk about a couple of space stories today, both of which have come like signals traveling the great expanse to us via Reddit. And one thing that I like about the space communities on Reddit is that they are vast also, just like space. There's a lot of them. And they're like, just like any good subreddit, they kind of develop their own space jokes. But they're also full of nerds and experts.

• 1:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, the sweet spot, the space sweet spot.

• 1:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you know the phrase, "It's always the Pleiades"?

• 1:59Speaker 05

  No, but it does make me think of like a Greek tragedy. And I don't know if that's accurate.

• 2:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, you know, you're not far off on the Greek, right? Because, you know, a lot of our names for particular stars and star clusters and things like that are derived from Greek, right? And the things that we, you know, when we were first observing the stars, right? And Greek mythology and things like that. So the Pleiades is a group of stars. They're also sometimes called the Seven Sisters. And they are visible with the naked eye in the sky. And so one of the things that I think is kind of funny and that I watched kind of develop on Reddit a few years ago now, is people kept going into the stargazing subreddit, r slash stargazing, and I think also the astronomy subreddit.

• 2:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  And like with pictures that they had taken, like they'd seen it with their naked eye. They took a picture with their latest iPhone. And then they would like post it and be like, what is this? You know, just kind of like, you know, what is this thing?

• 3:05Speaker 05

  I see where this is going.

• 3:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  The answer.

• 3:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Is that it's always the Pleiades. And it was this thing that was like, at first, it was like, kind of annoying to people. It was like, dudes, like, please, like, stop posting this thing. Cause, cause, cause again, you can just see it. You can walk out in, you know, I walk outside if you're in a place with low light pollution. And you can see this star cluster. But if you're coming into a space where like, everybody knows a little bit of something about something, they're like, please, come on, come on, come on, come on. So the thing that of course, like that happened, which I think is ultimately the always the the final destination of this kind of thing, is there is now a subreddit called It's Always Pleiades.

• 3:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Really what I want to talk about today is just the level of nerdery. And you're going to tell us a little bit about the level of conspiracy theories that connects to the various space subreddit, the galaxy, if you will, of space subreddits.

• 4:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, the great space mysteries out there.

• 4:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Exactly. And by the way, yes, I live in Western Massachusetts, which means yes, listeners, I also know that the plead is also the logo on every Subaru I sit behind as I drive around Western Mass. Okay. Recently, I came across a post that piqued my interest and a comment, a top comment that I really loved. It's from phys.org, P-H-Y-S dot org, which is obviously a science website. The post has in quotes, astronomers discover long period radio transient of unknown origin.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  Hmm, okay. All right. Tell me more.

• 5:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is essentially a regularly occurring radio signal. It occurs at regular intervals. And whenever we, you know, discover this kind of thing, I think to the layperson, that can feel like, oh, my God, is it aliens? Right?

• 5:17Speaker 05

  Right. Is someone trying to talk to us? Yeah.

• 5:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Is someone trying to talk to us? And of course, you know, we've sent out signals. And anyway, this is where people's heads go automatically. Spoiler alert, it's not aliens.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  No.

• 5:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Sorry to let you down.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  I'm disappointed and reassured at the same time.

• 5:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  So funnily enough, the top comment is from a user who is actually an astronomer. Actually, she's kind of famous on Reddit. Her name is Yvette Cendes. She's an assistant professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Oregon. She studies a bunch of stuff like titled disruption events when stars, dying stars, get pulled into black holes. She looks at exoplanets, all these kinds of things that, as she says, I think go bump in the night. But she has the top comment on this, like, oh, my God, is it aliens post?

• 6:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  And she always starts her comments, or often starts her comments with, "Radio astronomer here. TLDR, still probably not aliens." She explains very clearly and concisely that there are lots of things in space that have a periodic signal. She says the most famous are pulsars, which are neutron stars that spin rapidly and have a radio beam leading us to see a radio, quote, "pulse" every few seconds. So, you know, she is pointing out that this, this latest signal that's been discovered,

• 6:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  it has a stable pulse profile over a 36-minute period, which is definitely unusual. And while we don't know, you know, the authors of the, the latest paper don't know what's causing it yet, it could be an unusual white dwarf star, the core of a dead star, like what the sun will be someday. It could be a number of things, but, but long story short, it is not probably not aliens.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  Probably.

• 7:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  Well, it's good. She's a good scientist. She's caveating. Yeah.

• 7:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. Like any good scientist. She does say, "Finding unusual signals that repeat in weird time scales, isn't that unusual and happen somewhat often in radio astronomy?" She says her favorite example called, quote, "The Great Galactic Burper" was observed to burst 10 minutes every 77 minutes and did so for several years, but hasn't been recorded since 2007.

• 7:59Speaker 05

  Huh.

• 7:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  I just loved that detail, like. Burping, belching stars that just for some reason that cracks me up.

• 8:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, like the concept of a star doing what happens to me after I eat a bunch of dairy is like, it's crazy. I mean, we share that.

• 8:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  So I did call Yvette up to make absolutely sure she didn't think it was aliens and also to get a very simple description of what radio astronomy is. It's not listening to things so much. It's it's really studying radio waves and radio waves are part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum of different kinds of radiation, right? You've got visible light, you've got X-rays, you've got gamma rays, and then you've got radio waves which are below 100 gigahertz. And radio waves are really special because they can represent these kind of different physical processes that happen in space but are not observable in the other parts of the spectrum. So one example is the environment, for instance, around a black hole. This is

• 9:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  a place where there's not a lot of light escaping. And we can't see radio waves, but if something happens that's really big, it creates shock waves. And then that makes electrons spin in a certain way. This is according to Yvette. And you're only really going to see that or be able to get data or information from that kind of thing, or from around a black hole, for instance, with radio waves.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Hmm. Okay, that makes sense.

• 9:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  The good, maybe bad news is that it's never aliens. And it's actually never been aliens since radio astronomy was invented. Yvette told me this, that she said she said the guy who invented radio astronomy, like, as soon as they started observing radio waves and radio information in this way, people were like, is it aliens? And even from jump, the first person who invented radio astronomy, you know, said, it's not aliens. And that's been happening since it was invented over 50 years ago.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  Which is not that long of a span of time when you consider how long space has been around. So I don't think we should say never aliens because you never know.

• 10:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's never aliens. It's never aliens so far.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  It's never aliens so far. Exactly.

• 10:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  But shout out to Yvette and her lovely posting on Reddit. She goes on Reddit by the name Andromeda321. So if you want to follow her or follow the work that she does on Reddit, you can find her that way. And shout out to all the nerds and space lovers on the various space subreddits who are interested in this stuff and asking questions and and doing the fun stuff.

• 10:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Whenever we're talking about the possibility of aliens, we can dip into the weird, the weird zone. Yes. And Kolyani, you have a story about that. It's been a kind of like a long running theme, at least that I've seen on Reddit. And we're going to talk about that in a minute.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. There's a part of high performance that drives you, shapes you, and pulls at you too. Rarely spoken, almost never examined. That's the quiet tension. Coming up, psychologist and executive coach Dr. Sharon Turbin with Steve Paliuka on what separates the leaders people follow from the ones they don't. Stay with us for a preview. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Uh, Taylor Hanson? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  But Taylor Hanson's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Taylor Hanson? Nice.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Try one.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Mmm.

• 12:15Speaker 06

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.

• 12:23Speaker 07

  I'm Alison Aubrey, longtime health and science correspondent with NPR. And I've got a new podcast all about the science and wisdom of life after 50. It's called Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. We want to take you on a journey to help you explore all the opportunities to make change and feel good as you step into middle age and beyond from WBUR and NPR.

• 12:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Your Turn with Alison Aubrey from NPR and WBUR. Supported by AARP. New episodes every Thursday.

• 13:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, we're back. Koyani, you have yourself gone on an expedition like any brave astronaut. And you've come back with some information.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  So I did actually have to be quite brave for this story. I had to go back to geometry and learn about a very intriguing shape at Saturn's North Pole. And I'm going to send you some pictures now from NASA. Take a little look see, if you will.

• 13:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  So what sticks out to you from this picture? What's notable about the shape?

• 13:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, I'm sort of cheating because I asked you to look into this and I know, I know what from which you speak. And it is, of course, a hexagon. And I know that because the only math I was ever good at was geometry. So it was a hexagon.

• 13:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, so that shape that you're seeing, it looks a lot like a storm. It's right at the top of the planet and NASA has described this hexagon as a hurricane-like vortex. And to be clear here, from what I understand, it's not quite like our hurricanes, which rely on water and heat. So for the purposes of this conversation, it's safest to call the hexagon a vortex. And it's huge, by the way, twice the width of Earth and the eye itself is about 50 times Larger than a typical hurricane on this planet.

• 14:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  So like you're saying, like, you're saying just like lock the windows or whatever?

• 14:31Speaker 05

  Lock the windows. You gotta get some like real industrial strength locks.

• 14:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Fill the bathtub?

• 14:37Speaker 05

  Yep, because there's some crazy winds going on here. Like the hex has wind speeds double that of Earth's strongest cyclones. So I don't know if your windows are gonna do the job.

• 14:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, so you're saying the candles and the playing cards that I have set aside and the snacks is not gonna...

• 14:56Speaker 05

  They're gonna be vanquished by the winds of Saturn's hexagon. And we've actually known about this hexagon for a pretty long time. I mean, at least like a long time in human years. Saturn's hexagon was first spotted by both of the Voyager spacecrafts in the early 1980s.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  We step out of our solar system into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  When the Voyager spacecrafts flew by Saturn, they couldn't get a great picture of the hexagon, but it did sort of capture our first encounter with the Saturn hexagon, if you will.

• 15:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Close encounters of the hex kind.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  Exactly. So it's pretty odd, actually, because normally when you think of a vortex, like, you know, like a cyclone, a hurricane, you're thinking of a circular curved shape, a little curvy storm. You don't usually see straight lines or a hexagon. And that's got people online tingling with curiosity. I mean, who doesn't love a space mystery? And I, and I wanna flag one Reddit comment that really speaks to that, which is someone who wrote, "Why is it a hexagon in the first place? I'm fine with it. I'm not judging it. I respect it, but I'm curious."

• 16:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Spoken like a true Reddit commenter who's absolutely terrified of being piled on.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  You don't know, but it's actually a source of a lot of mystery. People online are really interested in where this came from and it's sparking a little bit of conspiracy. I would say there's like two camps with the conspiracy. There's people who are having fun and I want to talk about those people first because we gotta have a little fun before we have a little.

• 16:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Not fun?

• 16:48Speaker 05

  Not fun, yes, before we have some bad times. Here's some comments from a Reddit post that really made me laugh. One of them says astronomers need to look out for the giant Allen wrench that was used to assemble our solar system.

• 17:05Speaker 05

  Someone else has said it's most likely bees, right? Which I actually think makes the most amount of sense because if you look at honeycombs, they're kind of like hexagonal, right?

• 17:19Speaker 05

  All right, pause. It's Kalyani from after we recorded this episode with a note to my past self. Past Kalyani, the word you are looking for here is hexagonal. I know that sounds like a pompous British aristocrat, but it is right. I did a lot of reading of that word before recording, but not a lot of saying it out loud. So you will hear this pronunciation a few more times in this episode. Trust me, I know, hexagonal. Okay, back to the past.

• 17:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm, yeah, that's, that's right. It does, it does vaguely resemble a beehive.

• 18:00Speaker 05

  So anyways, aside from the jokes and fun that people are having with the hexagon, there's also a contingent of people who take this pretty seriously.

• 18:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, boy.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're gonna need a few deep breaths before we get into some of this. There's some pretty detailed conspiracy theories. In my research, the main one that came up was a sect of people who believe in something called Saturn's black cube. Have you ever heard of that?

• 18:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  You know, I feel like I've been just very slightly down this rabbit hole and then immediately forgot everything that I ever learned, maybe for the best, but my oxygen is flowing through my space suit. It's okay. I'll be okay. Let's go.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  So let me do a little of explaining on what this is. I need to issue a caveat here, which is that like, I don't have a mind for conspiracy. I'm not very good at it. So I found sort of breadcrumbs is how I would describe my journey down this conspiracy rabbit hole. And it started with a post on Reddit from about seven years ago that was called Saturn and Saturn black cube symbolism. It was super, super long. I have to be real, I skimmed a lot of it. But here's the section that I found interesting, and I'm going to read a little bit from it. "The Saturn black cube is derived from the shape one can superimpose upon an image

• 19:29Speaker 05

  of the hexagonal storm that rages continuously on Saturn's north pole. Theorists submit that pretty much anything cube-shaped in mainstream society is a secret devotion to Saturn." And then they give a few examples here. "The black cube at Mecca, the Jewish to fill in, various images in pop culture and advertising. Additionally, they believe that Saturn is satanic and alien slash reptilian and represents Illuminati and N W O-esque machinations at play. Is it machinations? How do you say that word?

• 20:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  I don't know. It's kind of like a Uranus Uranus situation, to be honest.

• 20:06Speaker 05

  Yep. Exactly. I don't know what N W O is, but I'm sure it's a layer of something.

• 20:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's, I'll tell you what, it's a new world order.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 20:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  And I believe it refers to

• 20:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Conspiracy theorists who think that like the globalists, the globalists are trying to take over.

• 20:27Speaker 05

  Okay, we're gonna get there. From there, I started looking a little further and then I found my way to a subreddit called r/saturnstormcube. This is how it describes itself on Reddit. The first line is, "Light has no fellowship with darkness. We are committed to exposing the global occult agenda. All related aspects are covered such as God, the concealed primeval cube, alien entities, the day of the storm, the time matrix, agendas of ancient and modern secret fraternal orders, and secret messages contained within an ancient art and modern media."

• 21:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, the Saturn Cube, we're not even at the kicker yet. The Saturn Storm Cube theory is the theory that a secret cult in devotion to Saturnian power controls the world governments, religions, banks, societies, etc.

• 21:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  If only all these theorists had gone through the part of sixth grade where you had, where like the part of, the part of school was like basically like, what you need to do is like the first sentence of the paragraph has to actually then be explained by the rest of the paragraph. These, these people are like, the kitchen sink energy of these people is completely out of control. Guys, get an editor. Come on.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  Get an editor, get a focus group. So the subreddit was founded in 2021, but as far as I can tell, there's still new folks that are finding their way to this conspiracy. Here's one post that I found from three days ago. The title says, "Starting to see the cube everywhere. Looking for real sources." The person says, hi, everyone. I've been diving into the Saturn storm cube theory lately. And honestly, it's blowing my mind. Once you start noticing the cube symbolism in media and religion, it's literally impossible to unsee it. I'm still pretty young and new to all of this. So I'm trying to piece together the history of the Saturnian cabal and the time matrix.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  Does anyone have a good starting point or books that really break down how this relates to world governments and secret societies? I really want to understand the bigger picture of the concealed primeval cube without getting lost in too much noise. Thanks for any help.

• 22:54Speaker 05

  Is how I feel about that.

• 22:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  To me, there's a couple of things that are mentionable here. Number one, like when I hear lizard people and cabal, obviously alarm bells go off for me because of the nature of some of these conspiracy theories. But also, like, I'm down with like a certain level of mysticism. Like, if you want to tell me about like ancient civilizations and the possibility of aliens, like, I'll get down with you and watch some ancient aliens or whatever. But like, I'm not going to take that stuff seriously without without actual like scientific evidence. Do you know what I mean? People really start to lose it when they they start to just like lean into symbolism so hard that it just becomes this like extremely chaotic energy.

• 23:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  And also, they just like lean hard always in the same direction, which is there's the secret guys who are going to get there, controlling everything, you know? And it's just, I just, I don't buy it. Humanity's too messy for that.

• 23:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I'm glad that you flagged that because that's like kind of the main thing that I really wanted to talk about, which is that. This Saturn's Black Cube conspiracy theory is treading really familiar conspiracy theory ground. Like, there's some very clear antisemitic dog whistles, tropes there. The use of the word cabal, the idea that there's a secret group of people controlling banks and society. Like, those are really dangerous and harmful tropes that have been used to demonize Jewish people through, you know, through history.

• 24:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 24:30Speaker 05

  I think it's pretty important that we, we say that and we point that out. And I also think that, like, you commented on this earlier, but this is like a mishmash of a ton of different conspiracy theories. We've got a little bit of the Illuminati, a little bit of aliens. Like, there's just like a real...

• 24:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Kitchen sink. It's real Kitchen Sink vibes, man.

• 24:51Speaker 05

  Kitchen sink, yeah. Like a big stew.

• 24:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, it's a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of ideas.

• 24:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. For me, it was so odd to go from, "Oh, this is a cool feature on Saturn," to, "Oh, my God, we're at harmful conspiracy theories in like, three to five clicks." You know, it didn't take me long to get there. And that was stunning.

• 25:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 05

  And, and, and it's, you know, on this subreddit, I was looking through the rules and the community guidelines. And one of the guidelines says, "Certain posts directly calling out a certain group are removed to safeguard the sub from removal." And then they go into depth saying, "Because reddit.com administrators enforced one of their site-wide rules on a Saturn Storm Cube discussion, posts specifically calling out a certain group are now removed on Saturn Storm Cube to protect all of its priceless resources. If you have found this sub, there shouldn't be a need to explain which group you can't criticize. Use your best judgment."

• 25:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow. So they're like, walking right up to the line of hate speech, but not crossing, not putting a toe over the line because they know they'll get bonked by the Reddit admins.

• 26:05Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  There is also like, a level, when you get into this kind of subreddit, there is, we should also like, acknowledge a level of shitposting and like, silliness that happens, where it's like, there are people just trying to be edgelords and trying to like, you know, trying to sort of, you know, post jokes and, and stuff like that. But... It's still like often kind of like teeters into this zone where it's like, ah, you're just being a jerk, man.

• 26:37Speaker 05

  So conspiracies aside, I actually do want to talk briefly about some of the actual science going on here. Scientists are pretty interested and intrigued by it, too. It actually took NASA until 2006 to get a really good picture of the hexagon, which, shout out to the Cassini space probe, which got us those pictures.

• 26:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Nice.

• 26:59Speaker 05

  It's unfortunately burned up in Saturn's atmosphere on purpose in 2017. R I P Cassini space probe. You did your big one.

• 27:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  R I P Cassini.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  Scientists were really taken aback when they got these visuals. In a 2007 statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Kevin Baines, who was an atmospheric expert and a member of the Cassini team, said, "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet."

• 27:29Speaker 05

  But experts do have some explanations that are based in science that they've come up with in the years since we've gotten these pictures. I want to start with a clip of a 2014 New York Times video, which features former Cosmic Affairs correspondent Dennis Overby.

• 27:44Speaker 06

  The hexagon is a narrow jet stream that circles the North Pole. Researchers think that friction with the slower clouds on either side of it creates eddies, mini storms, that push the jet stream into a wave-like shape as it goes around.

• 28:01Speaker 06

  By spinning columns of water at different speeds, scientists have been able to reproduce the six-sided pattern in the lab.

• 28:10Speaker 05

  So that's kind of a basic explainer.

• 28:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm liking it. I like the prayer bells as well. That's nice. Yeah.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  And there's one other piece of information to consider here, which I got from NASA and I'm going to do my best to explain, which is that, we talked a little bit earlier how unusual it is on Earth to see a hexagonal cyclone hurricane. You just, you wouldn't see that. And what NASA says is that Saturn's conditions are simply different than Earth's, which makes Since they're different planets, so Earth is not a uniform planet. It has water, land, ice, snow, all of those different things cool and heat at different rates. Earth also has mountains which go up into the sky and disturb the atmospheric flow. So that's like things that Earth has that Saturn does not.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  So essentially Saturn has like less things in its atmosphere that would disrupt the formation of that kind of hexagonal shape is another explanation that NASA put forward at one point.

• 29:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  I mean, also way more likely than Satanist lizard people or whatever it is. Like I just, all of these things, and they're amazing in and of themselves. Like these, these different theories from actual scientists are really cool. It's really cool to think about this different surfaces of planets and how that, you know, how that would contribute to the way that weather moves on a planet. That's fascinating to me. I also just think like, the only reason that we know there is even a difference between a cube or a square and a hexagon is like, that stuff surrounds us in nature.

• 29:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  So I find it weird that we like would see a simple shape that like already exists in nature around us, which is even the reason that we have a name for a shape like hexagon. And then we like, and we're like, oh, no, no. Man, on Saturn, it's weird. It's weird on Saturn. It doesn't make sense on Saturn. It's weird. And like, that's what good science is, I think, in a lot of ways. It's like exploring these things that capture our attention. But pretending that it's like some sort of mystical, magical thing, like I just, I just don't get it, man.

• 30:28Speaker 05

  There are still two small little mysteries here for scientists to figure out, which is that they're not quite sure why Saturn has a hexagonal jet stream only in the north and not in the south. And they also, and this is kind of the kicker, they don't know why this hexagon has been going on for so long. Like after all these decades, it was first spotted in the 1980s. And this storm, if it is a storm or a vortex, has been holding the same shape for decades. That's pretty. That's pretty striking, but they don't know why yet. But I'm sure we'll figure it out at some point, maybe.

• 31:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, as soon as we find that hex wrench.

• 31:10Speaker 05

  As soon as we find that hex wrench. Or a little Cassini that we can send out there.

• 31:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  We need another couple of little Cassini's.

• 31:18Speaker 05

  We need a little more Cassini in this, uh, in this solar system.

• 31:30Speaker 05

  Well, I promised that I was going to play you a little bit more audio, just for some fun, which is that before Cassini was plunged into Saturn's atmosphere, it actually did gather radio emissions from the planet, uh, which NASA converted into sound.

• 31:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  You know what? It sounds like a hexagon.

• 31:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's a real hexagon sound.

• 31:58Speaker 05

  Yes, and I mean, it gives me, it gives me a little shiver of my spine. It sounds like what space should sound like. And it also triggers a little bit of that, like primal fear about like, oh, we are so small in such a big vacuum.

• 32:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Agreed. It's, it's a lovely sound. It's a wild sound.

• 32:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  So Kolyani, before we go, I want to return briefly to our friend from the top, Yvette Cendes, the radio astronomer, also known as u/Andromeda321 on Reddit. Believe it or not, she has commented on some of the most popular posts and a recent post about Saturn's North Pole.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  Wow, full circle. Tell me more.

• 32:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Full, full hexagon.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  Full hexagon.

• 32:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Full hex. So she did recently comment just, just days ago, and she started her comment. Can you guess how she started her comment?

• 33:04Speaker 05

  I'm a radio astronomer, real life radio astronomer.

• 33:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Astronomer here.

• 33:08Speaker 05

  Oh, there we go. Short, concise.

• 33:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  She says, "This makes it sound more mysterious than it really is," in talking about the fact that we can't explain why this storm is hexagonal.

• 33:21Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  She says, "It has something to do with turbulent flow in the gas giant atmosphere, of which there are a lot for all gas giants. And there are multiple detailed simulations and experiments that can give you a hexagon shape at the end of it, but we have no good way of distinguishing between them to find the correct one at this time. Source: I teach a solar system class sometimes."

• 33:50Speaker 05

  Ooh. Well, that's basically what we unpacked a little earlier. And I love that, like, anytime there's a question about gas, like, space gas, she's on the scene. She's got the answers.

• 34:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  She's on the scene, man.

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Stories for today's episode were brought, researched, and co-hosted by me and Ben Brock Johnson.

• 34:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  This episode was reported by Kalyani Saxena and me. It was produced by Grace Tatter. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by our production manager and ancient alien, Paul Vikes.

• 34:34Speaker 05

  The rest of our team is Amory Sivertson, Dean Russell, Chiosna Bernado, Emily Jankowski, and our managing producer, Samantha Joshi.

• 34:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a podcast about the blurred lines between online communities and the great galactic burper.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  Have an online space mystery, untold history, or other wild story from the internet? Email us at [email protected].

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast with Dr. Sharon Churbin, psychologist, executive coach, and a close listener to what lives beneath high performance. Here she is with Steve Paliuka, who built Bain Capital and helped bring a championship back to Boston on the thing the best leaders do that most don't.

• 35:35Speaker 06

  The best leaders kind of give credit and take blame. When something goes wrong, they're the first ones to take responsibility for it. And they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever problem there was, what went wrong. You miss the sales target on the salesperson, they reflect on themselves and what they could do better. Same thing, you know, what Joe Mazzulla does in basketball. If you see his press conferences and the Celtics don't play well, the first thing he says is, you know, "I need to coach better. I made a mistake here. I made a mistake there." Not many coaches do that. But that's why the players, you know, love Joe, and that's why, another reason, he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn.

• 36:17Speaker 06

  There are many, many more things like that I learned from people like Red Auerbach and my classmates from business school and sports and all the rest.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  And really, what an array of leaders, because leadership is both the same and different depending on the environment that you're in. Listen for more of the Quiet Tension wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:39Speaker 01

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• 36:47Speaker 03

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• 36:51Speaker 01

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.