A supersonic wind blows across the planet 500 light years from Earth.
Astronomers have discovered supersonic winds on a gas giant planet 500 light-years away from Earth.
In the year Astronomers, who have been studying the planet’s weather since 2016, said in a study released Tuesday that the findings show that this is “the fastest wind ever measured in the planet’s orbiting jet stream.”
“This is something we’ve never seen before,” said Lisa Nortmann, a scientist at the University of Göttingen in Germany and lead author of the study.
The team says they have mapped the weather on the planet WASP-127b. CRIRES+ tool – consisting of both a spectrograph and an adaptive optics system – on European Southern Observatory’s Largest Telescope.
The findings show that WASP-127b, slightly larger than Jupiter but only a fraction of its mass, has a jet stream that moves at six times the speed at which the planet rotates. By comparison, the fastest wind measured in the Solar System has been found on Neptune, moving at just 0.5 km per second, scientists said.
European Southern Observatory
By tracking the speed of the molecules, the team mapped the planet’s surprisingly complex climate – they observed a double peak, which indicates that one side of the atmosphere is moving towards us and the other is moving away from us at high speed. This shows that there is a strong wind current around the planet.
The researchers suggested that a strong jet stream blowing near the equator could explain this unexpected result, indicating that the planet has complex weather systems like Earth and other planets in our solar system.
“Understanding the dynamics of these exoplanets can help us probe mechanisms such as heat distribution and chemical processes, improve our understanding of planet formation, and shed light on the origins of our own solar system,” said David Kont of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Germany, and co-author of the paper.
Derived from exoplanets Only a few dozen have been filmed live so far.basis NASA. Scientists hope that further studies will reveal whether the young planets formed where they are now or migrated from elsewhere, and how they interact with each other.