Artist’s visualisation of the gas giant planet WASP-127b
ESO/L. Calçada
A vast alien planet has blistering winds racing around its equator at nearly 30 times the speed of sound on Earth.
Lisa Nortmann at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and her colleagues used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe WASP-127b, a giant gas exoplanet more than 500 light years from Earth. It is slightly larger than Jupiter but is one of the least dense planets we know of.
The team expected to see a light signal from the planet’s atmosphere that had one distinct peak, but instead found two separate peaks.
“I was a little bit confused,” says Nortmann. “But with a little bit more careful data analysis, it became clearer that there are two signals. I was quite excited – my first thought was immediately that it has to be some sort of super-rotating wind.”
The researchers concluded that the two peaks came from rapid winds in a jet stream around the planet’s equator, with half the wind moving towards Earth and the other half moving away from it. The wind, which appears to be made up of water and carbon monoxide, seems to be moving at 33,000 kilometres per hour, making it the fastest wind ever measured on a planet.
“We’re talking about 9 kilometres per second. The wind speed on even Jupiter is like a few hundred metres per second, so this is really an order of magnitude larger,” says Vivien Parmentier at the University of Oxford.
You wouldn’t be able to feel these extreme speeds if you were in this wind, because it would be moving around you at the same speed, he says. But you would experience temperature differences of hundreds of degrees over a matter of hours, as the winds moved from the hot side of the planet, which is permanently facing its star, to its cold side, which sits in constant darkness.
The researchers don’t know why WASP-127b has such extreme winds, but Nortmann says the planet has certain special properties, such as its low density and its wonky orbit around its star, that could play a role. “However, no clear connection has been established between those facts and the particularly strong winds.”
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