We have just detected winds of more than 30,000 km/h on an exoplanet

According to extreme weather record According to the World Meteorological Organization, the fastest wind gust ever recorded on our planet occurred on Barrow Island, Australia, and reached 113.2 meters per second or 407.5 km/h. If we expand the search to the solar system, we will discover that the winds can accelerate even more: up to 1,770 km/h on Neptune.

33,000 km/h. Wind records on Earth and other planets in the solar system pale in comparison to those recently observed by VLT instruments (Very Large Telescope) from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), located in the Atacama Desert, in Chile: up to 33,000 km/h is the speed they can reach in WASP-127b.

WASP-127b. Exoplanet WASP-127b is located in our own galaxy, about 500 light years from Earth. The planet was discovered in 2016 and has since attracted interest from the astronomical community. It is a planet very little densewith a volume somewhat larger than that of Jupiter (it is approximately 1.3 times its size) and a mass only 0.16 times the mass of the gas giant in our solar system.

We also know about this planet that it orbits close to its star, so much so that it is believed to be in the state we know as tidal lock. That is, like the Moon with the Earth, WASP-127b orbits its star while rotating on itself, always offering the same face to it.

Supersonic winds. The team responsible for the study used the CRIRES+ instrument of the VLT observatory to analyze the climate of the planet WASP-127b. The team was analyzing how light from the star WASP-127 interacted with the planet’s outer atmosphere to understand its composition when they came across a double peak in the spectrum, which seems to indicate that part of the atmosphere is moving towards us and part is moving away. moves away, both at high speed.

“Part of the atmosphere of this planet is moving towards us at great speed, while another part is moving away from us with the same alacrity,” explained in a press release Lisa Nortmann, who led the study of the planet’s winds. “This signal shows us that there are very fast, supersonic winds around the planet’s equator.”

With these data, the team estimated that the speed at which the atmosphere was moving could reach 9 kilometers per second, or in other words, about 33,000 km/h, something never seen until now. Job details were published in an article in the magazine Astronomy & Astrophysics.

More than wind. The study of the planet’s atmosphere allowed us to learn other details about WASP-127b’s atmosphere and its climate, for example, its composition. The team was able to confirm the presence of water vapor in this atmosphere, as well as carbon monoxide molecules.

They also observed that the atmosphere showed slight differences in temperature on its day side compared to its night side. “This shows that the planet has complex weather patterns like those of Earth and other planets in the solar system,” added Fei Yan, co-author of the work.

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Image | IT/L. Calçada