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An artist’s visualization of WASP-127b
ESO / L. Calçada
The fastest wind ever measured in our solar system was on Neptune, with gusts of more than 1,100 miles per hour. But those powerful gales are nothing compared to the supersonic winds that astronomers have just discovered on the giant exoplanet WASP-127b.
Reaching up to a whopping 20,505 miles per hour—or more than 5 miles per second—these winds create the fastest jet stream around a planet that scientists have ever measured. The discovery was published Tuesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“This is something we haven’t seen before,” lead author Lisa Nortmann, an astrophysicist at the University of Göttingen in Germany, says in a statement.
To compare those speeds with something closer to home, WASP-127b’s equatorial winds are about 1,000 times stronger than the gales on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, one of the windiest places on Earth, per Discover magazine’s Paul Smaglik.
Discovered in 2016, WASP-127b is a gas giant within the Milky Way, located more than 500 light-years from Earth. It’s a little bigger than Jupiter, but with a much smaller mass, leading scientists to describe it as “puffy.”
“WASP-127b is a gas giant planet, which means that it has no rocky or solid surface beneath its atmospheric layers. Instead, below the observed atmosphere lies gas that becomes denser and more pressurized the deeper one goes into the planet,” David Cont, an astrophysicist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a study co-author, tells Reuters’ Will Dunham.
An exoplanet with extreme supersonic winds | ESO News
The team used an instrument called CRIRES+ on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to collect the data. When WASP-127b moved between Earth and its host star, the instrument measured starlight that traveled through part of the gas giant’s atmosphere to reach us.
With these observations, the researchers identified the presence of carbon monoxide molecules as well as water vapor in the atmosphere of the exoplanet. They then measured the speed of these molecules and were shocked by what they found: a “double peak.” Simply put, that meant one part of the planet’s atmosphere is moving away from us, while the other side is moving toward us—at the same high speed.
This “shows us that there is a very fast, supersonic, jet wind around the planet’s equator,” Nortmann explains in the statement.
Wind speeds on Jupiter, a planet known for its storms, are less than one mile per second, “so this is really an order of magnitude larger,” Vivien Parmentier, a physicist at the University of Oxford in England who did not participate in the study, tells New Scientist’s Alex Wilkins.
The researchers also discovered that the exoplanet’s poles are cooler than the rest of it. Among other factors, this suggests WASP-127b has complex weather patterns, similar to Earth.
While the “primary source of energy” for the supersonic winds is radiation from the gas giant’s host star, “answering the question of what drives these intense winds is challenging, as several factors influence wind patterns in exoplanet atmospheres,” Cont explains to Reuters.
Understanding such exoplanet mechanisms could hold implications for scientists’ knowledge of planet formation or even the origin of the solar system, Cont adds in the statement.
The recent discovery is also a demonstration of how far exoplanet research has come. Just a few years ago, scientists had limited data on planets beyond our solar system—now, we understand that even Earth’s most ferocious winds are nothing compared to those whipping around WASP-127b.
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