Artist’s rendering of the giant planet WASP-127b
Secondary school/L. the sidewalk
A vast alien planet has strong winds around its equator at nearly 30 times the speed of sound on Earth.
Lisa Nortmann At the University of Göttingen in Germany and colleagues used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe WASP-127b, a gas giant exoplanet more than 500 light-years from Earth. It is slightly larger than Jupiter, but is one of the least dense planets we know.
The team expected to see a signal of light from the planet’s atmosphere with a separate peak, but instead found two separate peaks.
“I was a little confused,” says Nortmann. “But with a little more detailed analysis of the data, it became clearer that there are two signals. I was quite excited; my first thought immediately was that it must be a super-swirling wind.”
The researchers concluded that the two peaks came from high-speed winds in a jet stream around the planet’s equator, with half of the wind moving toward Earth and the other half away from it. The wind, which appears to be composed of water and carbon monoxide, appears to be moving at 33,000 kilometers per hour, the fastest wind ever measured on a planet.
“We are talking about 9 kilometers per second. Jupiter’s wind speed is only a few hundred meters per second, so this is an order of magnitude higher,” he says. Vivien Parmentier at the University of Oxford.
If you were in that wind, you wouldn’t be able to feel those extreme speeds because it would be moving around you at the same speed, he says. But you’d have temperature differences of hundreds of degrees in a matter of hours, with the wind blowing from the hot side of the planet, which is forever facing its star, to its cold side, which is perpetually in darkness.
Researchers don’t know why WASP-127b has such extreme winds, but Nortmann says the planet has some unique features, such as its low density and tortuous orbit around its star, that may play a role. “However, no clear link has been established between these events and particularly strong winds.”
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