Visualization of the artist of the Guant Giant Planet Wasp-127b
ESO / L. Sidewalk
A large extraterrestrial planet has blisters that run around its equator at almost 30 times the speed of sound on earth.
Lisa Nortmann At the University of Göttingen, Germany, and his colleagues used the very large telescope of the Southern European Observatory in Chile to observe Wasp-127b, a giant gas exoplanet with more than 500 light years from the Earth. It is slightly larger than Jupiter but is one of the less dense planets we know.
The team expected to see a light signal from the planet's atmosphere that had a separate peak, but rather found two distinct peaks.
“I was a little confused,” explains Nortmann. “But with a little more data analysis, it became clearer than there are two signals. I was very excited – my first thought was immediately that it must be a kind of super rotary wind.”
The researchers concluded that the two peaks came from fast winds in a jet jet around the equator of the planet, half of the wind moving towards the earth and the other half moving away from it. The wind, which seems to be composed of carbon water and monoxide, seems to move 33,000 kilometers per hour, which makes it the fastest wind ever measured on a planet.
“We are talking about 9 kilometers per second. The speed of the wind on the same Jupiter is like a few hundred meters per second, it is therefore really an order of magnitude, ”explains Vivien Parmentier at the University of Oxford.
You could not feel these extreme speeds if you were in this wind, because it would move around you at the same speed, he said. But you would feel the temperature differences of hundreds of degrees in a few hours, while the winds moved on the warm side of the planet, which definitively faces its star, next to its cold side, which is in constant darkness.
Researchers do not know why WASP-127B has such extreme winds, but Nortmann says that the planet has certain special properties, such as its weak density and its wobbly orbit around its star, which could play a role. “However, no clear link has been established between these facts and the particularly strong winds.”
