Artist’s view of the gas giant planet WASP-127b
ESO/L. Calcada
Winds at nearly 30 times the speed of sound on Earth are blowing around the equator of a giant alien planet.
Lisa Nortman at the University of Göttingen, 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 light signal from the planet’s atmosphere that had a distinct peak, but instead found two distinct peaks.
“I was a little confused,” says Nortman. “But with a little more careful data analysis, it became clear that there are two signals. I was quite excited – my first thought immediately was that this must be some kind of super-swirling wind.
The researchers concluded that the two peaks came from strong winds in a jet stream around the planet’s equator, with half of the wind moving toward Earth and the other half moving away from it. The wind, which appears to be composed of water and carbon monoxide, appears to be moving at speeds of up to 33,000 kilometers per hour, making it the fastest wind ever measured on a planet.
“We are talking about 9 kilometers per second. Even on Jupiter the wind speed is a few hundred meters per second, so it’s really an order of magnitude higher,” says Vivian Parmentier At Oxford University.
They say, if you were in this air you would not be able to feel these extreme speeds, because it would be rotating around you at the same speed. But you would experience a difference of hundreds of degrees in temperature in just a few hours, as the winds moved from the planet’s hot side, which permanently faces its star, to its cold side, which remains in constant darkness. .
Researchers don’t know why WASP-127b has such strong winds, but Nortman says the planet has some special properties, such as its low density and its unstable orbit around its star, that may play a role. “However, no clear connection has been established between those facts and particularly high winds.”
Subject:
(tagstotranslate)exoplanet