Scientists find a huge 10-sided wave pattern swirling in the clouds over Saturn’s south pole - AP News

The spinning formation, called a decagon, showed up in Hubble Space Telescope images captured in 2023. A Spanish-led team reported Wednesday that the shape appears to be even larger and less stable than the famous hexagonal cloud pattern around Saturn's north pole, which NASA's Voyager probes first spotted in the 1980s.

Researchers believe the decagon may have formed sometime between 2017 and 2023, a window when Saturn's south pole was tilted away from Earth and impossible to observe directly. That gap in visibility is likely why nobody caught it forming in real time.

For folks in Lubbock who grew up watching shuttle launches on the classroom TV or catching night-sky events at the Texas Tech observatory, this is the kind of discovery that puts Earth's weather systems in perspective. The north pole hexagon has been a staple of astronomy conversations for decades, and now the south pole has produced something even stranger. Wide enough to fit multiple Earths inside it, the hexagon has long set the bar for strange planetary geometry, and the decagon appears to dwarf even that.