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Extreme supersonic wind gusts measured on a planet outside the solar system

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Wind gusts accelerate up to 33,000 kilometers per hour on the extrasolar planet WASP-127b. An international team of scientists has managed to observe the weather on this distant world using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. As researchers explained, this is the fastest phenomenon of this type ever observed.

According to data from the World Meteorological Organization, the strongest wind gust on Earth apart from tornadoes had a speed of 407 kilometers per hour and was measured on the Australian Barrow Island in 1996 during the passage of Cyclone Olivia. In natural conditions, higher speeds are sometimes recorded in the case of tornadoes – in 2013 in Oklahoma, the winds briefly accelerated to over 500 km/h. This is nothing compared to Neptune, where the wind speed reaches up to 1,770 km/h.

According to a study published in “Astronomy & Astrophysics the most powerful gusts in the solar system are a gentle breeze compared to the weather far beyond its borders.

Nine kilometers per second

Since the discovery of WASP-127b, a gas giant located 500 light-years from Earth, astronomers have been interested in what weather might be like on such a strange world. The planet is slightly larger than Jupiter, but has only a fraction of its mass, which makes it “swollen”. The team mapped the weather and composition of WASP-127b using the CRIRES+ instrument on the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT).

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By measuring how the host star's light traveled through the planet's upper atmosphere, scientists were able to determine its composition. The results confirmed the presence of water vapor and carbon monoxide particles in the atmosphere. When the team tracked the velocity of this material in the atmosphere, they observed an unusual phenomenon.

“Part of the atmosphere was moving towards us at high speed, while another part was moving away at the same speed,” explained Lisa Nortmann from the University of Göttingen, lead author of the study. – This signal shows us that there is a very fast, supersonic wind stream around the planet's equator.

Researchers estimated the wind speed at nine kilometers per second, or nearly 33,000 km/h. The gusts therefore move nearly six times faster than the planet rotates. This is the fastest wind ever measured in a jet moving around the planet. “We have never seen anything like this before,” Nortmann added.

Complicated weather system

The research group also determined that the poles are cooler than the rest of the planet, and detected a slight temperature difference between the morning and evening sides of WASP-127b. As co-author of the analysis Fei Yan from the University of Science and Technology of China explained, this shows that the planet has complex weather patterns, just like Earth and other planets in the solar system.

The field of exoplanet research is developing rapidly. A few years ago, astronomers could only measure the masses and radii of planets outside our solar system, but now telescopes allow scientists to map the weather on these distant worlds and analyze their atmospheres.

'Understanding exoplanet dynamics 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 the solar system,' explained David Cont of the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, co-author of the paper.

Main photo source: ESO/L. Calçada



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