Using the powerful space telescope, astronomers saw the ringed planet's northern summer cooling as a 7.5-year-long autumn approaches.
"No spacecraft has ever been present to explore Saturn's late northern summer and autumn before, so we hope that this is just the starting point," University of Leicester School of Physics and Astronomy professor Leigh Fletcher.
Saturn and some of its moons as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam instrument in June 2023. The new JWST observations have been compiled in an animation that shows how the appearance of the gas giant changes over different wavelengths of light, just as the shift of summer to autumn can be seen by the yellowing of the leaves on trees here on Earth.
Also seen in the JWST data is a 932-mile wide polar cyclone at Saturn's north pole. This is ringed by a broad region of warm gasses that were observed as they gathered during spring in the northern hemisphere of Saturn called the north-polar stratospheric vortex .
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