Artist’s impression of the very strong winds in WASP-127b.
By comparison, in the Solar System, the fastest wind was detected on Neptune, at a speed of 1,800 kilometers per hour.
Astronomers have detected the fastest winds ever measured on a planet, which can reach speeds of 33,000 kilometers per hour, the European Southern Observatory (OES) announced this Tuesday.
Such winds occur at the planet’s equator WASP-127ba gas giant outside the Solar System that is more than 500 light years away from Earth.
The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers with the help of the VLT telescope, at OES, in Chile, and is described in an article this Tuesday in the scientific magazine Astronomy & Astrophysics.
WASP-127b is slightly larger than Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, but has only a fraction of its mass, according to OES, an organization of which Portugal is a member. The exoplanet has no analogue in our Solar System and It’s rare even in the thousands of exoplanets discovered so far. It takes just over four days to orbit its parent star and its temperature is around 1400 K (1127º C).
By comparison, In the Solar System, the fastest wind was detected on Neptune, at a speed of 1,800 kilometers per hour.
Astronomers mapped the climate and composition of WASP-127b, discovered in 2016, having detected the presence of water vapor and carbon monoxide molecules in the planet’s atmosphere and concluding that the polar regions are colder.
“Understanding the dynamics of these exoplanets helps us explore mechanisms such as heat redistribution and chemical processes, improving our understanding of planetary formation and potentially shedding light on the origins of our own Solar System”, he maintains, cited in the OES statement, one of the paper’s co-authors, David Cont, from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany.
