Saturn is already dramatic with its rings, but its north pole has something even stranger: a massive six-sided storm pattern.
NASA’s Voyager spacecraft first spotted the feature in the 1980s, and the Cassini mission later captured it in stunning detail. Instead of a normal swirling circle, Saturn’s polar jet stream forms a near-perfect hexagon, with each side stretching thousands of miles.
The whole shape is roughly 30,000 kilometers wide, large enough to fit more than two Earths across it. It is not a solid object, of course it is a fast-moving atmospheric pattern, driven by winds and turbulence deep in Saturn’s gas giant weather system.
Scientists have reproduced polygon-like shapes in fluid experiments, but Saturn’s long-lasting hexagon is still one of the solar system’s most bizarre weather mysteries.
On Earth, storms spin and fade; on Saturn, the sky decided to draw geometry.