OK, this is not really fresh news, since it broke back in March and it’s now late June. But the hexagon on Saturn continues to be just as astounding despite my delay in reporting. What is up with that amazing planet and its amazing moons? Am I going to have to devote an entire blog category to covering every shocking new finding coming from there? When searching for a reference in the news to the hexagon, I was pleased to see that MSNBC shares my awe about the entire Saturnian neighborhood (although they did not mention Iapetus’ dark spot or ridge, because they mistook the press release for science fiction, I guess).

But back to the hexagon. The best thing about it, of course, like every other crazy planetary feature in and around Saturn, is that scientists did not expect it and do not really have an explanation for it. “Every puzzle’s easy when you know the answer,” a colleague of mine used to say. Given enough data and time to digest it, I’m sure that all of these features will eventually have no more mystery than the clouds in the sky, which is to say, only the mystery that metaphor and imagination can give them.

Don’t get me wrong. I like finding out the what and the why. In the case of atoms and molecules, the truth turns out to be vastly more complicated than Democritus’ imagination could have ever ventured. But there is still something uniquely exciting about that transition zone between the shock of discovery and the testing of the first hypothesis, when something like the hexagon can be anything, and everything, at once.