Astronomers discovered the huge planet WASP-127b nearly a decade ago. Now, they've found this world harbors winds of some 20,500 mph, or 33,000 km/h.
That's nearly 19 times faster than the strongest planetary winds in our solar system — the 1,100 mph gusts on Neptune. The robust supersonic winds whipping around this distant gas giant's equator are spinning six times faster than the planet itself, which is a little bigger than Jupiter.
"This is something we haven’t seen before," Lisa Nortmann, a scientist at the University of Göttingen who led the new research, said in a statement.
Astronomers used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope facility — located in the remote and profoundly dry Chilean mountains at some 8,645 feet — to observe these extreme winds. Specifically, an instrument called the CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle Spectrograph, or CRIRES+, which is used to look for super-Earths and the composition of other exoplanets, made the observation possible. The planet's nearby star illuminated the molecules in WASP-127b's atmosphere, allowing the instrument to reveal that one side of the atmosphere moved away from us at high speed, while the other side moved toward us at high speed.
"This signal shows us that there is a very fast, supersonic jet wind around the planet’s equator," Nortmann said.
Earth along with some other planets in our solar system have jet streams too. They're like rivers of high-speed atmospheric air, and have major implications for our Earthly weather as they separate cold and warm air masses.
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Exoplanets, which are planets beyond our solar system, are often much too small and faint for space or Earth-based telescopes to capture an actual image — though there are exceptions. We can't actually see this extreme jet stream on WASP-127b, so you'll have to live with the conceptual views above.
"This is something we haven’t seen before."
But even without a direct image, astronomers can learn a lot about a world like WASP-127b based on the starlight traveling through its atmosphere and how it impacts its parent star. From the recent observations, astronomers confirmed this gas giant harbors water vapor and carbon dioxide gases, and has cooler poles and different temperatures, suggesting a complex weather system.
In the coming years, with an ever bigger telescope dubbed the Extremely Large Telescope — which hosts a huge 128-foot (39-meter) primary mirror — astronomers will be able to detect weather on much smaller, rocky worlds, perhaps similar to Earth.
