A Gas Giant 500 Light-Years Away Has the Fastest Winds Ever Recorded: A Staggering 33,000 km/h
The fastest planetary winds ever found are tearing across a distant gas giant.
Tibi PuiubyTibi Puiu January 24, 2025 in News, Space Reading Time: 3 mins read
Edited and reviewed by Zoe Gordon
Some 500 light-years away, a giant gas planet named WASP-127b is caught in a cosmic tempest. Winds howl across its equator at speeds of up to 33,000 kilometers per hour (20,000 mph) — nearly six times faster than the planet itself rotates. These supersonic jetstreams, the fastest ever measured on a planet, are so furiously strong they’re rewriting our understanding of weather beyond the Solar System.
“This is something we haven’t seen before,” said Lisa Nortmann, an astronomer at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and lead author of the study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
There’s more to this far-away planet. While slightly larger than Jupiter, WASP-127b has only a fraction of its mass, giving it a “puffy” nature that intrigues scientists.
A Puffy Planet with a Violent Heart
WASP-127b’s low density makes it an ideal cosmic laboratory for studying atmospheric dynamics on other worlds. The team used the CRIRES+ instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to analyze how starlight filters through the planet’s upper atmosphere. They detected water vapor and carbon monoxide, but what truly stunned them was the speed of the atmospheric material.
More:
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-gas-giant-500-light-years-away-has-the-fastest-winds-ever-recorded-a-staggering-33000-km-h/
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Until recently, astronomers could only measure the mass and radius of exoplanets. Now, thanks to instruments like CRIRES+, they can peer into their atmospheres and even map their weather. But this is just the beginning.
The Extremely Large Telescope (yes, astronomers love to name telescopes like this), currently under construction in Chile, promises to take this research even further. With its advanced ANDES instrument, scientists will be able to study smaller, rocky planets and resolve even finer details of atmospheric dynamics. “This means we can likely expand this research to planets more like Earth,” Nortmann said.
We live in incredible times!
