In the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, jet streams, narrow bands of air that move lightning fast, create winds of speeds greater than 442 km/h, but they are not the strongest in our solar system, and while on Neptune they reach; at a speed of about 2000 km/h, these are all breezes compared to the jet streams on the planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers discovered winds blowing at a speed of about 33,000 kilometers per hour on that gaseous planet, located in our galaxy – the Milky Way – and about 520 light-years away from Earth.
At nine kilometers per second, jet winds move almost six times faster than the speed at which the planet rotates, the European Space Agency announced.
WASP-127b orbits a star similar to our sun. A light year means the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one year – 9.5 billion kilometers.
The supersonic jet winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest winds ever measured on a planet.
“On that exoplanet, we discovered extremely strong winds, the speed of which is surprising,” said astrophysicist Lisa Nortmann from the German University of Gottingen and lead author of the study published in the journal Astronomija i astrophysics (Astronomy & Astrophysics).
So far, more than 5,800 planets outside our Sun’s system – exoplanets – have been discovered. WASP-127b is a type of exoplanet we call “hot Jupiter”. It is a gas giant orbiting very close to its host star. Its diameter is about 30 percent larger than that of Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System. But its mass is only 16 percent of the mass of Jupiter, which makes it one of the “fluffiest” planets, with the lowest density of all measured planets.
As WASP-127b is a gas planet, it has no rocky or solid surface beneath the atmospheric layers.
“Instead, beneath the observed atmosphere lies gas that becomes increasingly suffocating and under increasing pressure the deeper we go into the planet,” said study co-author David Cont of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
The planet WASP-127b takes about four days to revolve around its star and then passes five percent of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, due to which it is surrounded by stellar radiation. And as in the case of our Moon, one side of the exoplanet WASP-127b is constantly facing the star.
The temperature of the atmosphere is around 1100 degrees Celsius. The polar regions are somewhat less hot than the rest of the planet.
Like Jupiter, WASP-127b is composed mostly of hydrogen and helium.