Supersonic winds rage on planet over 500 light-years from Earth

Astronomers discovered supersonic winds on a giant gas planet located over 500 light-years from Earth.

In a study released Tuesday in Astronomy & Astrophysics astronomers who have been studying weather on the planet since 2016 said findings show this “is the fastest wind ever measured in a jetstream that goes around a planet.”

“This is something we haven’t 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 European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

Findings showed WASP-127b, which is slightly larger than Jupiter but has only a fraction of its mass, had jet winds move at nearly six times the speed at which the planet rotates. In comparison, the fastest wind ever measured in the solar system was found on Neptune, moving at only 0.5 km per second, scientists said.  

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 away from us at high speed. This indicates that there is a powerful wind current going around the planet. 

Researchers concluded that powerful jetstream winds around the equator would explain this unexpected result, and shows 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,” says David Cont from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and a co-author of the paper.

Of the exoplanets discovered so far, only a few dozen have been directly imaged, according to NASA. Scientists hope that further research will reveal if the young planets formed at their current location or migrated from somewhere else — and how they might interact with each other.