Astronomers have discovered a huge planet with the fastest wind speeds ever observed in the universe.
The gas giant WASP-127b, which is located over 500 light-years away from Earth, has winds that travel around its equator six times faster than the planet’s rotation speed.
Observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope recorded wind speeds that reach up to 33,000 kilometres per hour (20,000mph).
“This is something we haven’t seen before,” said Lisa Nortmann, a scientist at the University of Göttingen, Germany.
“Part of the atmosphere of this planet is moving towards us at a high velocity while another part is moving away from us at the same speed. This signal shows us that there is a very fast, supersonic, jet wind around the planet’s equator.”
The supersonic winds are more than 60 times faster than the fastest winds ever observed on Earth, which were recorded during an exceptionally powerful F5 tornado in Oklahoma, US, in 1999.
Even the fastest winds ever observed in the Solar System, found on Neptune, are a relatively modest 1,800kph.
The astronomers behind the latest finding revealed that the WASP-127b planet also has variable weather conditions due to cooler poles and different temperatures depending on the time of day.
“This shows the planet has complex weather patterns just like Earth and other planets of our own System,” said Fei Yan, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China who co-authored a study detailing the findings.
Fellow co-author David Cont from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich added: “Understanding the dynamics of these exoplanets 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 our own Solar System.”
The study, titled ‘CRIRES+ transmission spectroscopy of WASP-127 b’, was published this week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
