A new imaging of Saturn’s moon Titan has revealed something a little spooky, just in time for Halloween: Two mysterious glowing patches of gas, one at each pole. The amorphous glowing shapes are shifted to either side so that one appears as dawn reaches the southern hemisphere, while the other aligns with dusk in the north. As of yet, NASA isn’t sure of the significance of glowing clouds, but acknowledges that the discovery is unprecedented.

“This is an unexpected and potentially groundbreaking discovery,” said Martin Cordiner, an astrochemist working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the lead author of the study. “These kinds of east-to-west variations have never been seen before in Titan’s atmospheric gases. Explaining their origin presents us with a fascinating new problem.”

Scientists have long been interested in Titan’s atmosphere, believing it to share many characteristics with Earth in its early stages. A hotbed of chemical activity, these images of Titan were taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a network of high-precision antennas in Chile. The wavelengths used by the equipment are such that the reading was obtained in a very short (three minutes) observation session.

Two gasses, hydrogen isocyanide (HNC) and cyanoacetylene (HC3N), are known to exist in “caps” at either pole in Titan’s atmosphere. However, when examining the highest altitudes, they found the aforementioned concentrations of the gasses shifted off the poles. Common sense tells scientists that the strong, steady east-west winds circling Titan should mean that atmospheric gasses are thoroughly mixed, not concentrated in off-centered masses.

“It seems incredible that chemical mechanisms could be operating on rapid enough timescales to cause enhanced ‘pocket’’ in the observed molecules,” said Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at Goddard and a coauthor of the paper, published online today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We would expect the molecules to be quickly mixed around the globe by Titan’s winds.”

Astronomers have no explanation for the phenomenon, with theories ranging from chemical causes to the effects of Titan’s magnetic field.