Saturn's storm in action: Scientists create incredible animations of hexagonal tempest using photos taken by the Cassini probe Footage shows storm on Saturn's north pole raging with winds of 200mph Largest wind system is 2,200 miles wide - this is twice the size of largest hurricane ever recorded on planet Earth "A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades - and who knows - maybe centuries," said Nasa's Andrew Ingersoll The bizarre six-sided storm churning Saturn's north pole has been captured in unprecedented detail. The hexagon is a wavy jet stream of 200 mph winds and spans 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) across - more than twice the diameter of Earth. Scientists believe there is no weather feature like this anywhere else in the solar system. Scroll down for video and animations... The animation above shows a view from directly over Saturn's north pole, keeping up with the rotation of the planet so that all the motion seen on the screen is the motion of the storms inside the hexagon. The footage captured by the Cassini spacecraft is the first of its kind, using colour filters, to show a complete view of the top of Saturn. "A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades - and who knows - maybe centuries," said Andrew Ingersoll, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. This animation above shows a view from directly over the north pole, keeping up with the rotation of the planet so that all the motion seen on the screen is the motion of the storms inside the hexagon. This older, colour composite image - showing false shades - has been created from raw images taken by Cassini from a distance of 379,268 miles away The mysterious six-sided hexagon on Saturn's North Pole has long captivated astronomers is thought to be is nearly 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers). The hexagon is made of a band of upper-atmospheric winds which creates its six-sided shape. A polar cyclone can be seen at its centre. First seen by Voyagers 1 and 2 over 30 years ago the hexagon it thought to be fixed with Saturn's rotation. In April, the Cassini spacecraft provided scientists with the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling within the hexagon. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane were estimated to be travelling at around 330 mph (150 metres per second). Weather patterns on Earth are interrupted when they encounter friction from land forms. Scientists suspect the stability of the hexagon has something to do with the lack of solid land forms on Saturn, which is essentially a giant ball of gas. Better views of the hexagon are available now because the sun began to illuminate its interior in late 2012. Cassini captured images of the hexagon over a 10-hour time span with high-resolution cameras, giving scientists a good look at the motion of cloud structures within. Scientists saw the storm around the pole, as well as small vortices rotating in the opposite direction of the hexagon. Some of the vortices are swept along with the jet stream as if on a racetrack. The largest of these vortices spans about 2,200 miles (3,500 km), or about twice the size of the largest hurricane recorded on Earth. The footage captured by the Cassini spacecraft is the first of its kind, using colour filters, to show a complete view of the top of Saturn Scientists analysed these images in false colour, a rendering method that made it easier to distinguish differences among the types of particles suspended in the atmosphere inside and outside the hexagon. "Inside the hexagon, there are fewer large haze particles and a concentration of small haze particles, while outside the hexagon, the opposite is true," said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia. The hexagonal jet stream is acting like a barrier, which results in something like Earth's Antarctic ozone hole. The Antarctic ozone hole forms within a region enclosed by a jet stream with similarities to the hexagon. Wintertime conditions enable ozone-destroying chemical processes to occur and the jet stream prevents a resupply of ozone from the outside. At Saturn, large aerosols cannot cross into the hexagonal jet stream from outside and large aerosol particles are created when sunlight shines on the atmosphere. Only recently, with the start of Saturn's northern spring in August 2009, did sunlight begin bathing the planet's northern hemisphere. "As we approach Saturn's summer solstice in 2017, lighting conditions over its north pole will improve, and we are excited to track the changes that occur both inside and outside the hexagon boundary," said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist. This spectacular, vertigo inducing, false-colour image from Nasa's Cassini mission highlights the storms at Saturn's north pole. The mysterious six-sided hexagon is thought to be is nearly 20,000 miles (30,000 km)