Astronomers have discovered supersonic winds on a gas giant planet located more than 500 light-years from Earth.
In a study published Tuesday in Astronomy & astronomy, astronomers who have been studying the planet's weather since 2016 said findings show it is “the most powerful wind fastest ever measured in jet streams orbiting 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 includes both a spectrograph and an adaptive optics system – on the The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.
The results showed that WASP-127b, which is slightly larger than Jupiter but has only a fraction of its mass, had jet winds moving at nearly six times the speed at which the planet rotates. In contrast, the fastest wind ever measured in the solar system was found on Neptune, moving at just 0.5 km per second, scientists said.
Southern European Observatory
The team explained a surprisingly complex weather system on the planet by tracking the speed of molecules – they saw a double peak, indicating that one side of the atmosphere is moving towards us and the other is on get away from us at high speed. This shows that there is a powerful wind current going around the planet.
The researchers concluded that powerful jetstream winds around the equator would explain the unexpected result, and show that the planet has complex weather systems like Earth and other planets in the our solar system.
“Understanding the dynamics of these exoplanets helps us study mechanisms such as heat redistribution and chemical processes, improving our understanding of planet formation and potentially shedding light on the origin of our own solar system, ”says David Cont from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, and co-author of the paper.
Of the discovered exoplanets so far, only a few dozen have been photographed directlyaccording to NASA. Scientists hope that further research will reveal whether the young planets were formed where they are now or whether they migrated from somewhere else – and how they might interact with each other.
