The three layers of the Tylos gas giant atmosphere
That / m. Terminal
The atmosphere of a distant world has been mapped in detail for the first time, revealing a strange meteorological system and upside down, with the The fastest winds Never inexplicably seen blowing around the planet's stratosphere.
Astronomers have studied the wasp-121b, also known as Tylos, since 2015. The planet, which has been 900 light years, is a large ball of jupiter's size, and it is extremely orbit of its star, completing a complete orbit in just 30 hours of land. This closed orbit heats the planet's atmosphere at temperatures of 2500 ° C, hot Enough to boil the iron.
NOW, Julia Seidel At the Southern European Observatory in Chile and his colleagues looked inside the burning atmosphere of Tylos using the very large telescope of the observatory, and they found that he had at least three distinct layers of gas moving in different directions around the planet – a structure not like everything that has ever seen astronomers. “It's absolutely crazy, science fiction models and behaviors,” says Seidel.
The planetary atmospheres of our solar system share a structure largely similar to each other, where a powerful wind reaction flow blowing in the lower part of the atmosphere is driven by internal temperature differences, while the winds in the upper layers are more affected by the temperature differences created by the heat of the sun, which warms the day of the day of the planet.
However, in the atmosphere of Tylos, it is the winds of the lower layer which are driven by the heat of the star's star, traveling on the hot side, while the jet stream seems to be mainly in the intermediate layer of the atmosphere, traveling around the equator of Tylos towards the rotation of the planet. An upper layer of hydrogen also shows JetSstream type characteristics, circulating around the planet but also drifting outwards in space. This is difficult to explain using our current models, explains Seidel. “What we see now is actually exactly the opposite of what comes out of theory.”
In addition, the Jet Stream on Tylos is the most powerful ever seen, exploding around 70,000 kilometers per hour on half of the planet – double the speed of the Previous dossier. What exactly stimulates this speed is not clear, but researchers think it may be due to the high magnetic field of the planet or because of the ultraviolet radiation of its star. “It could possibly change the flow models, but all of this is very speculative,” says Seidel.
