
Extreme jet stream: Alien planet has universe's fastest recorded winds
Exoplanet weather forecast for WASP-127 b: Record-setting jet stream winds!
Astronomers aimed the Very Large Telescope in Chile at a nearby exoplanet and discovered jet stream winds blowing nearly 80 times faster than any seen here on Earth, and the fastest of their kind ever recorded in the universe so far.
A little over 500 light years away from Earth is an immense planet astronomers have named WASP-127 b. It's a gas giant world, similar to Jupiter. However, despite being slightly larger than Jupiter, this planet is only around one-sixth of Jupiter's mass, making it an extremely 'puffy' world. It is also so close to its star that it only takes around 4 days to complete one orbit.
As a result of being so close to the star, temperature extremes on the day and night side of WASP-127 b drive the strongest winds detected so far on any planet, either in our solar system or beyond it.

This artist’s visualisation of WASP-127b, a giant gas planet located about 520 light-years from Earth, shows its newly discovered supersonic jet winds that move around the planet’s equator. (ESO)
By measuring water vapour and carbon monoxide in the planet's atmosphere, and how those chemicals reacted to the starlight filtering through the planet's clouds, they were able to track how fast those chemicals were travelling.
astronomers were able to detect a doppler shift in the light emitted by these chemicals. The magnitude of the shift indicated that determine exactly how fast those winds are — roughly 33,000 kilometres per hour!

WASP-127 b's distance from its star is only around 5 per cent of the distance between Earth and the Sun, or just over 10 per cent of the distance of Mercury from the Sun. (NASA's Eyes on the Solar System)
"This is something we haven't seen before," Lisa Nortmann, the lead author of the study that made this discovery, from the University of Göttingen, said in an ESO press release.
"Part of the atmosphere of this planet is moving towards us at a high velocity while another part is moving away from us at the same speed," Nortmann explained. "This signal shows us that there is a very fast, supersonic, jet wind around the planet's equator."
The researchers were able to make this discovery by using the CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle Spectrograph (CRIRES+) instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in northern Chile.
They began by observing the star WASP-127, before, during, and after the planet (WASP-127 b) passed in front of it. Then, using the observations before and after as a baseline, they were able to subtract away the star's direct light to see only the light that filtered through the planet's atmosphere and out into space from its dark side.
Splitting that planetary light into a spectrum then revealed the chemical composition of the atmosphere, as well as telling them more about those components (such as how fast they are travelling towards or away from us at the evening and morning edges of the planet).
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How extreme is extreme?
The winds around the WASP-127 b's equator are travelling at around 9 kilometres a second, or nearly 33,000 km/h.
For a sense of just how fast that is, according to the World Meteorological Organization, the fastest wind gust ever recorded at Earth's surface was 407 km/h, recorded at Barrow Island, Australia, on April 10, 1996, when Cyclone Olivia passed through the island. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the fastest jet stream wind on Earth at 416.5 km/h, recorded by a weather balloon above Tottori, Japan, on February 5, 2004.
The fastest winds ever recorded in our entire solar system were actually seen on Neptune. NASA says that the winds there have been clocked at around 2,000 km/h.

Neptune, as imaged by Voyager 2 in 1989 and colour calibrated by Justin Cowart in 2016 to appear closer to how the human eye would see it. Rather than having distinct cloud bands like Jupiter, Neptune's clouds are drawn out into streaks by the high velocity winds that blow around the planet. (NASA/JPL/Voyager-ISS/Justin Cowart)
Just last year, NASA reported that a different 'hot Jupiter' planet, named WASP-43 b, around 280 light years away, had winds that reached up to 8,000 km/h.
However, WASP-127 b blows them all away!
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Complex alien weather
In addition to the powerful jet stream winds blowing around the equatorial region of WASP-127 b, the researchers were also able to make a more detailed weather map of the planet.
Although it is subjected to extreme heating by being so close to its star, this alien world still has cooler regions near its north and south poles. The researchers were also able to detect slight temperature differences between the morning and evening sides of the planet.
"This shows that the planet has complex weather patterns just like Earth and other planets of our own System," study co-author Fei Yan, from the University of Science and Technology of China, told the ESO.
It's already a remarkable feat for scientists to detect what the weather is like on a planet 500 light years away. However, the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope, with its ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph (ANDES) instrument, will be able to do even more. While the Very Large Telescope (VLT) combines four individual telescopes with mirrors just over 8 metres wide each, the ELT will have one primary mirror nearly 40 metres across. This will allow the ELT to gather more light from stars and their respective planets, allowing astronomers to get even better observations of distant alien worlds.
“This means that we can likely resolve even finer details of the wind patterns and expand this research to smaller, rocky planets,” Nortmann added.
The Extremely Large Telescope is expected to begin its exploration of the universe in 2028.
(Thumbnail image is an artist impression drawing of WASP-127 b and its extreme jet stream winds from the ESO/L. Calçada, with a red wind icon added for effect by the author)