Particle.news
Download on the App Store
25 ARTICLES
·
14h ago

Hubble Confirms a Ten‑Sided Decagon at Saturn’s South Pole

The feature is a vertically extended wave trapped in a polar jet that could reveal how large atmospheric patterns form on gas giants.

Image
Image
Saturn as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope at a wavelength of 763 nm on 29 August 2025. The yellow box indicates the region shown on the polar map (left image), where the black arrow marks the position of the decagon. Credit: EHU/NASA/ESA
Image

Overview

  • A peer‑reviewed paper published in Science Advances on Sept. 2, 2026, presents Hubble and ground-based observations that confirm a 10‑sided atmospheric wave encircling Saturn’s south pole.
  • Researchers traced the pattern in Hubble OPAL images back to 2023 and show it sharpened through 2024 and 2025 while Cassini-era data from 2004–2017 show no similar southern polygon.
  • Multiwavelength Hubble data indicate the decagon sits inside a powerful polar jet and extends through multiple atmospheric layers, so it is not just a cloud‑top feature.
  • The study reports the decagon’s vertex longitudes oscillate with a roughly 32‑day period and offers competing origins—jet instabilities, forcing by nearby anticyclones, or storm perturbations—without a single confirmed cause.
  • The discovery built on long‑term OPAL monitoring and amateur observations from PVOL and now motivates targeted Hubble monitoring, planned JWST follow‑up, and fluid‑dynamics modeling to test how the feature will evolve.