“They are extraordinarily stable arrangements of such chaotic elements.”

One of these was the question of what lay at its elusive poles. When scientists got the first images, they were stunned. At the north pole, eight storms surrounded one storm at the center. At the south pole, it was the same arrangement, only with five storms.

But the numbers stayed oddly constant: the storms weren’t drifting and merging, as current understanding of the science suggests they should.