Two views of Saturn from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveal a giant, evolving 10-sided atmospheric wave encircling the planet’s south pole. Credit: Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Agustin Sánchez-Lavega (UPV), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), Michael Wong (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan
By Alan Toth
Since its discovery in 1980, the hexagonal polar jet stream that surrounds Saturn’s north pole has perplexed scientists. The symmetrical six-sided polygonal wave has been duplicated in laboratory experiments by spinning a circular tank filled with liquid, but the reasons for its formation on Saturn and for its gradual color shift from blue to gold are still being debated. Now, scientists with the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, have uncovered another Saturnian mystery. They found that a blue decagon has recently emerged surrounding the planet’s south pole.
In a paper published today in Science Advances, scientists from the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the University of the Basque Country, described tracking the gradual emergence of the ten-sided jet stream wave by examining Hubble Space Telescope images going back to 2023. Features like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a cyclone which has persisted through nearly 200 years of observation, can create the impression that the outer planets are timeless and unchanging. Saturn’s decagon shows how changeable these planets can be.
