Saturn Just Grew a Second Hexagon — Except This One Has 10 Sides

A planet with two polar signatures

For decades, Saturn's calling card has been the hexagon: a bizarre, perfectly six-sided jet stream swirling around its north pole, wide enough to swallow four Earths. Now astronomers have spotted something almost as strange at the opposite end of the planet — a huge, ten-sided atmospheric pattern circling Saturn's south pole.

What a "polar hexagon" actually is

A polar hexagon isn't a solid shape sitting on the planet — it's a standing wave in Saturn's jet stream, a place where fast-moving bands of atmosphere lock into a stable, geometric pattern instead of swirling chaotically like storms on Earth. Scientists have been able to recreate hexagon-like shapes in lab tanks simply by spinning fluid at different speeds, which suggests the geometry comes from basic fluid dynamics rather than anything Saturn-specific.

Why the shape is different this time

The south pole's ten-sided version behaves the same way in principle, but the extra sides hint that the underlying wind speeds and layering are different from the north. Gas giants like Saturn have no solid surface to slow their winds down, so their polar jet streams can behave in ways nothing on Earth ever could — and a second, differently-shaped pattern gives researchers a rare side-by-side comparison on the same planet.

What happens next

Saturn's hexagon was already one of the strangest confirmed features in the solar system; a second, geometrically distinct one at the other pole raises new questions about how the planet's deep atmosphere is structured north to south. Future observations — likely from ground-based telescopes and orbiting spacecraft — will try to determine whether the shape is stable over decades, the way the northern hexagon has been since it was first photographed by Voyager in the 1980s.