Scientists found a giant, ten-sided atmospheric wave — called a decagon — circling Saturn's south pole, embedded in a jet stream near 63 degrees south. It is d…
Voyager 1 (12 November 1980) and Voyager 2 (25 August 1981) each flew past Saturn, capturing partial, awkward-angle images of the far northern latitudes. Nobody spotted…
Cassini became the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn on 1 July 2004, beginning 13 years of sustained observation — a sharp contrast to Voyager's brief pass. This is what…
With the north pole still unlit, Cassini's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer detected the hexagon by its heat signature, confirming it was still there without wai…
Saturn's northern spring equinox (11 August 2009) brought visible-light sunlight to the pole for the first time in the Cassini era. By the northern summer solstice (24 M…
Cassini was deliberately steered into Saturn's atmosphere on 15 September 2017 to protect the planet's potentially habitable moons from contamination, ending 13 years of…
Hubble red-filter images from October 2023 show, in retrospect, subtle hints of a ten-vertex polygonal shape near 63 degrees south. Nobody identified it as a decagon at…
In 2024, ground-based amateur and professional astronomers noted an undulating band around Saturn's south pole. By a Hubble image taken 29 August 2025 — around the time…
A peer-reviewed study led by Agustin Sanchez-Lavega (University of the Basque Country), with NASA Goddard's Amy Simon and UC Berkeley's Michael Wong among the co-authors…
Researchers plan continued annual Hubble monitoring and have flagged NASA's James Webb Space Telescope as a candidate for future study of the decagon's deeper atmospheri…
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