Astronomers have discovered supersonic winds on a giant gas planet located more than 500 light years from Earth.
In a study published Tuesday in Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomers who have been studying weather on the planet since 2016 said their results show it is “the fastest wind ever measured in a jetstream that circles a planet.
“This is something we’ve never seen before,” said Lisa Nortmann, a scientist at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and lead author of the study.
The team said they mapped the weather on the planet WASP-127b using the CRIRES+ Instrument — which consists of both a spectrograph and an adaptive optics system — on the The very large telescope of the European Southern Observatory.
The results showed that WASP-127b, which is slightly larger than Jupiter but has only a fraction of its mass, had plane winds traveling at a speed nearly six times the rotation speed of the planet. In comparison, the fastest wind ever measured in the solar system was observed on Neptune, moving at just 0.5 km per second, scientists say.
European Southern Observatory
The team mapped a surprisingly complex weather system on the planet by tracking the speed of molecules: they observed a double peak, indicating that one side of the atmosphere is moving towards us and the other is moving away from us at high speed. This indicates that there is a powerful wind current circulating around the planet.
The researchers concluded that powerful jetstream winds around the equator would explain this unexpected result and show that the planet has complex weather systems like Earth and other planets in our solar system.
“Understanding the dynamics of these exoplanets helps us explore mechanisms such as heat redistribution and chemical processes, improving our understanding of planet formation and potentially shedding light on the origins of our own solar system,” explains David Cont of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Germany, and co-author of the article.
Exoplanets discovered so far only a few dozen have been directly imagedaccording to NASA. Scientists hope that further research will reveal whether the young planets formed in their current locations or migrated from somewhere else – and how they might interact with each other.
