Saturn has a new, odd weather pattern resembling a decagon near its south pole. This may have formed due to a large storm nearby, but researchers aren’t totally sure.

The pattern has clearly defined sides shaped by powerful winds, looking like a decagon – a geometric polygon with 10 sides and 10 angles – from above. It is similar to a hexagonal weather pattern first seen at the planet’s north pole more than 40 years ago.

“[But] the one at the north is a bit smaller,” says at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The south pole pattern also seems to be moving a bit more with the rotation of the planet.

The feature was first spotted by amateur astronomers in 2024. Simon and her colleagues then examined images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope from 2023 to 2025. “We confirmed the existence of the decagon with absolute clarity,” says team member at the University of the Basque Country in Spain.

It is unclear exactly when the pattern formed, with no spacecraft having orbited Saturn since 2017. “It most certainly wasn’t expected,” says Simon. “The hexagon has been there for decades, but this is something new.”

The decagon measures about 13,000 kilometres across, slightly wider than Earth. It is thought to result from a large atmospheric wave shaped by wind from a powerful jet stream that meanders near the planet’s south pole.

Its formation may be linked to a large nearby storm, although the exact cause is a bit of a mystery. “It’s a very complicated fluid dynamics sort of thing,” says Simon. “It’s telling us something about what’s going on deeper below the clouds.”

Saturn’s rings form a giant dusty doughnut encircling the planet

The rings of Saturn are normally thought to be flat, but measurements by the Cassini spacecraft show that some of their particles fly hundreds of thousands of kilometres above and below the thin main discs

at the California Institute of Technology says the discovery highlights that Saturn is a dynamic, changing world. “It’s very interesting to see these features,” he says.

No similar pattern has been observed on any other planets, although Jupiter does have an at its poles. “People didn’t really predict that such an organised, polygonal pattern would exist on another planet,” says Ingersoll.

We don’t know how long the pattern will last. Other telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope, are poised to study it in more detail, but many scientists are vying for access to those. “We’ll look as frequently as anyone will let us,” says Simon.

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Venus has no moon, but a modelling study suggests it probably did have one for nearly 2 billion years – before the planet ate it. Understanding this could help us learn about Venus’s previous habitability.

Many large objects probably hit Venus in the early solar system, which could have formed a moon, similar to the giant impact that is thought to have formed Earth’s moon. “There’s a very good chance that Venus did have a moon-forming impact,” says at the University of California, Riverside.

The lack of a moon today is therefore quite unusual, but Kane and his colleagues might have an answer. They modelled what would have happened if Venus did have a moon, and found that in almost all scenarios, it would have been consumed by the planet, long erased from existence by the present day.

Venus rotates quite strangely with respect to the sun, completing a rotation once every 243 days, compared with its orbit of 225 days. This is possibly a result of its thick atmosphere slowing its spin.

In contrast, Earth’s much faster spin transfers angular momentum to our moon, meaning it is moving away a few centimetres each year. For Venus, the opposite would have been true. “The moon is transferring angular momentum inward instead of outward,” says Kane. “It causes the moon’s orbit to catastrophically collapse.”

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The researchers found that at the upper limit of their models, a moon about half the mass of our own could have survived around Venus for 1.7 billion years. At twice the mass of our moon, it would have survived just 30 million years, because of the stronger tidal effect.

Once the moon reached a distance of about 15,000 kilometres, it would have encountered a boundary known as the Roche limit. “That’s where Venus’s gravity rips the moon apart and consumption occurs,” says Kane, with the moon’s debris temporarily forming a ring around Venus until it fell into the atmosphere.

at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, says the model is interesting but hard to prove. “It’s exceedingly hard to test this idea because there is basically nothing left behind.” This is because Venus’s surface has been repeatedly resurfaced by volcanism, he says.

What changes will occur on Earth as the moon moves further away?

From tides to eclipses, the slow departure of our moon will affect life on Earth, say our correspondents

Kane, however, says a future mission to the surface of Venus could include a seismometer, a device that measures seismic waves to study the interior of the planet. This could look for evidence of a consumed moon buried underground. “That would tell us a lot,” he says.

If Venus did have a moon, it may have played a role in the planet’s habitability, with Venus once thought to have had oceans on its surface. It is possible a moon could be linked to the planet’s runaway greenhouse effect, in which it lost all its water for reasons unknown and developed a thick, deadly atmosphere.

“If there was an early habitable period of Venus, then the big question is what brought that to an end,” says Kane. A moon crashing into the planet could have evaporated much of its water. “It could definitely be connected to Venus’s runaway greenhouse state,” says Kane.

A star near the centre of the Milky Way is hurtling through its orbit with a peak speed of more than 8 per cent the speed of light, making it both the fastest star and the closest to a supermassive black hole that has ever been spotted. Named S301, this astonishing star could help us unravel the secrets of gravity.

at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and his colleagues found S301 using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. They have been watching it since 2023 to get enough data to pin down its orbit, and the results are unprecedented.

At its closest approach, S301 is only about 1.8 billion kilometres from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. That’s just 12 times the distance between Earth and the sun, 10 times closer to Sagittarius A* than the previous record-holder. “If you were living on a planet around this star, the size of the black hole at the closest approach would appear similar to the full moon from Earth – it would be absolutely stunning,” says Gillessen.

Such a close pass by the black hole means that S301 spends part of its orbit in one of the most extreme gravitational environments in the universe. Next to a black hole, space-time stretches and warps. If a black hole is spinning, it should warp space-time even more, twisting it up in what is known as the frame-dragging effect.

“Earth does this as well, and we can measure with satellites around Earth that there is a very, very slight frame dragging from Earth’s rotation,” says at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn’t involved in the research. “This is doing the same thing, just with much different objects.”

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Measuring Earth’s spin is relatively easy, but a black hole’s spin is much harder to determine because of its lack of a visible surface. The most precise way to measure it would be by measuring frame dragging, and S301 is the first star close enough to feel that effect.

“We drop a leaf in the wind and see how the air is moving by measuring that leaf,” says Gillessen. “A star is just the perfect leaf to drop to see the movement of space-time.”

Actually measuring the spin of Sagittarius A* using this method will probably take around a decade, he says, but that may speed up if we find more stars like it.

“With one star, it would take a while, but it would still be the best constraint on spin that we’ve ever had by far,” says at University College London. “If you can find another star that’s even closer, that’s better still. If you can find a population of these stars, then you’re in business.”

Gillessen and his team have several candidates for stars slightly further from the black hole than S301, but none yet that are closer, he says.

But when we finally do measure the spin of a black hole, it will be a crucial piece of the cosmic jigsaw. It will not only help us understand how black holes have contributed to the evolution of the universe, but will also provide a probe into the behaviour of gravity in extreme environments, which has proved extremely difficult to study.

“A black hole only has three measurable properties: a mass, a spin and possibly an electric charge. The mass was worth a Nobel prize in 2020, so, if you find the spin, you might expect a call from Stockholm in 20 years,” says Gillessen.

sε wo werε fi na wosan kɔfa a, yεnkyi

it is not incorrect to go back and get what you forgot

—Akan proverb

We are called to go back and get the history of space-time. And who am I to argue with the ancestors?

Even so, I do. Science in this society is often done for the wrong rea­sons, I find myself telling them. And they remind me that because it’s my job to study the origin and evolution of the universe and every­thing inside it, I know there is a location in space-time where the uni­verse became transparent to light: the first place where light could fly free. The ancestors insist: This is a story that I have learned so I could tell it to others. To do cosmology—to study the beginning and evolu­tion of space, time, and matter—is to be a griot, a keeper of stories and history. To do cosmology is to go back and get the beginning, to map out the future.

So: Quite nearly at the beginning, the universe said let there be light. And particles of light—photons—all of them traveling at the speed of light, the fastest in the universe, couldn’t get very far. They were stuck in a plasma stew where they constantly bumped into par­ticles, especially electrons, which swallowed their energy and spat it out in the form of new photons and other particles.

Humanity has only been aware of this cosmic light for eighty-two years. It has been there almost since the beginning of everything and has been traveling for nearly 14 billion years. It was there when the universe was cool enough for atoms to form. It was with the sun when it was just a cloud of gas, and it was there when the sun’s hydrogen ignited with fusion, turning the sun into a star. It was there when the leftovers from the gas cloud condensed into planet Earth. And it was there when carbon-based life forms evolved into apes.

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This light is a cosmic edge: We cannot look past it because at any time earlier than that, the photons were trapped, unable to get out. And this edge is a reminder that physics is a way of gaining deep insight into the universe, one we can add to the variety of overlapping forms of knowing that we have long used. To understand this bound­ary, and how we have come to know about it, is to deepen our rela­tionship with ourselves and the universe around us in a very specific and beautiful way. We should embrace it, for ourselves, and for future generations, because it is our history—and who are we to argue with the ancestors?

…

The book you are reading is about the queer, poetic wonder that is our universe and what we gain when we look at it from the margins. It is my version of what historian Aimé Dafon Sègla calls cosmovi­sions, a response to the question of why we should bother trying to get beyond the edges of human knowledge about the physical universe. The Edge of Space-Time is part of a larger tradition that includes not just scientists but also artists. People like jazz percussionist, artist, and technologist Milford Graves, who used percussion, sound, and observations of praying mantises and plant growth to understand a phenomenon he termed “cosmic energy.” Graves, a maker working in a long tradition of Black artists, was not formally trained as a scien­tist, and “cosmic energy” sounds a little like mystic talk. But when I listened to him describe his ideas in the documentary Milford Graves Full Mantis, I heard a familiar sensibility about how matter is linked with and through space-time, a relationship that takes center stage in this book.

As a set of knowledges and techniques, physics provides a path­way toward answering the same questions Graves asked about the fundamental nature of our cosmos and the relationship between matter, energy, and space-time. It allows us to specify in great detail the relationship between photons and the plants in Graves’s garden which transformed the photons into living particles. It is another entry point to what plant biologist and Black feminist theorist of intersectionality in science Beronda L. Montgomery calls lessons from plants.

When it’s at its best, physics is a kind of poetry, a story about the cosmos that is made from metaphors—and a producer of metaphors in its own right. We often analyze the world through metaphor, and I believe that seeing the universe through the perspective offered by physics strengthens our ability to understand what work metaphors are doing on us and how we might wield them. It is in this sense that physics works on us like poetry: a perspective on the world that provides insights not available to us elsewhere. This helps us under­stand why we should bother with it. We should bother with physics because it is, in part, how we as a species learn to use our minds. We should learn and teach poetry, physics, algebra, and other abstract ideas because they train us to think in symbolic and figurative terms. The same goes for calculus and quantum mechanics. And if we can­not learn to think in and through the abstract and the symbolic, then we are pliable. We are sitting ducks for the fascists and authoritarians who will use us for their ends, and their ends are ultimately catastro­phe for the rest of us. That’s always been true, and it always will be.

In a world where genocides (plural) can be live-streamed and still continue unabated, it is hard to imagine that society could be oth­erwise when what is broken about it feels so total and, in the case of the families shattered and lives lost, so final. I don’t think cosmology by itself can save the world. Even so, I believe in the ways that people experience a connection to the cosmos as nourishing. And I believe in preparing for the better world that is coming.

This is an extract from by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Canongate Books), the September read for the �鶹��ý Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is doomed to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere in the coming months, after a high-risk effort to save it failed.

On Wednesday 19 August, NASA said in a that an ongoing issue with the LINK spacecraft, built by US start-up Katalyst Space, meant that an effort to dock with and boost Swift in orbit would no longer be attempted.

“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in the statement. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting.”

LINK was launched in July on a mission to save Swift, a rapid-response telescope used to observe brief celestial events such as gamma-ray bursts. Swift has been steadily dropping in orbit since its launch in 2004 due to atmospheric drag. The $30 million rescue mission, designed and built in less than a year, was a last-ditch attempt to boost the telescope back into a higher orbit.

Soon after launching, however, LINK began to spin out of control. While Katalyst later stabilised the spacecraft, it was deemed to have to make the boost possible.

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“Katalyst designed, developed, and launched an experimental spacecraft to go after an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline,” the company’s CEO, Ghonhee Lee, said in a statement. “We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way.”

LINK will still rendezvous with Swift, but will no longer attempt to grab the telescope with its robotic arms. That means Swift will have a limited amount of final observations it can do before it re-enters the atmosphere by the end of the year, with no replacement telescope currently in the works.

The science of space exploration and astronomy: US

Take off on a quest through the past, present and future of space exploration across the US. Discover the first pioneering rockets, iconic missions, space stations and the emerging commercial space tourism industry.

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Millions of people got a rare glimpse of a total solar eclipse on 12 August, as the moon aligned perfectly with Earth and the sun to cast a shadow that passed over Siberia, the Arctic, Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain. It was the first total solar eclipse visible from Earth since early 2024.

Spain was the most populous region from which the total eclipse was visible, with the eclipse path passing across the country diagonally from the northern Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean Sea in the late afternoon of 12 August. The photo above was taken in Berlanga de Duero, 240 kilometres north-east of Madrid.

Observers at the Galactica astronomy centre in Teruel, Spain, were caught perfectly framed in this image. Although much of Spain saw a total eclipse, there was also a chance to witness a partial eclipse of around 90 per cent in Ireland, the UK, France, Italy and some parts of the north of Africa.

This composite image shows the progression of the eclipse from partial to total and back to partial again, over San Millán de los Caballeros, Spain.

Another composite image shows the total solar eclipse over the Mediterranean Sea, seen from Mallorca, Spain. It was the first such event visible from the country in over a century, with totality lasting around a minute.

A boat is captured here in line with the sun and the moon off the island of Ibiza.

The incredibly sharp collection of images above show the eclipse at various stages from Arija, Spain.

Spain will, surprisingly, see another total eclipse next year, on 2 August, along with Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Saudi Arabia.