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yesterday

Hubble Confirms Giant 10‑Sided Wave Encircling Saturn’s South Pole

Numerical simulations have not reproduced the feature and teams are using Hubble, JWST and ground telescopes to hunt for its cause.

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
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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft circled Saturn for 13 years and never saw a shape at the south pole, but when the planet’s slow seasons tilted that pole back toward Earth, a giant ten-sided figure was waiting there — and it had not existed while the probe was watching

Overview

  • The discovery team published their analysis in Science Advances on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026, confirming a ten‑sided atmospheric wave — a decagon — wrapped around Saturn’s south pole.
  • Amateur observers first flagged an odd undulating band in 2024 and Hubble OPAL images show the pattern back to 2023 with the shape sharpening through 2025.
  • The decagon is a vertically extended wave riding a strong eastward jet, with winds of roughly 400 kilometers per hour and a slow eastward drift near 10 km/h that gives it an ~800‑day rotation.
  • Scientists point to a nearby 4,000‑km anticyclonic vortex as a plausible trigger but say three‑dimensional simulations so far have failed to reproduce the observed ten‑sided pattern.
  • Researchers will continue Hubble monitoring, plan targeted JWST and ground observations, and refine models to determine whether the decagon will persist and what it reveals about giant‑planet atmospheric dynamics.