Content tagged "Saturn".
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Saturn's north pole has worn the same hexagon for more than 40 years. At the opposite pole, Hubble has now caught a ten-sided 'decagon' taking shape — faint in 2023, unmistakable by 2025. Why the two poles of the same planet grow shapes with different numbers of sides is still an open question.
For decades, scientists believed a hidden ocean lay beneath the icy crust of Saturn's moon Titan. A fresh look at old Cassini data by NASA/JPL researchers suggests otherwise: layers of ice and slush, with warm water pooling only near the core.
JWST and the Keck Observatory watched clouds swell and dissolve above Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It doesn't rain water there, it rains methane. Over roughly 30 hours, researchers tracked those clouds and confirmed that a world with real seasons and weather exists well beyond Earth.
Water and oil don't mix. Like dissolves like. That's what chemistry class teaches us — but on Saturn's moon Titan, at roughly 94 kelvin (about -179°C), the rule breaks down. Benzene and ethane team up to form a 'cocrystal,' a mineral that doesn't exist anywhere on Earth.
Jupiter boasts four Galilean moons while Saturn's only large moon is Titan. A study published in April 2026 traced that striking difference to the planets' magnetic fields — an invisible barrier that determined which moons lived and which ones fell.
Saturn's rings are arguably the most iconic sight in the solar system — and they're slowly falling onto the planet itself. NASA observations have revealed the phenomenon known as 'ring rain,' and the rings may be gone within 100 million years.
The James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope observed Saturn at nearly the same time. What infrared and visible light each uncovered tells us something profound about how planets are built.