Astronomers have discovered a planet with wind speeds of 33,000 km/h for the first time

Astronomers have discovered a planet where wind speeds reach 33,000 kilometers (7.5 to 7.9 kilometers per second). These are the fastest air currents on any known planet.

Scientists have found that the winds that rotate around the gas giant at a distance of more than 500 light years from Earth move at supersonic speeds. They analyzed the spectrum of light reflected from the planet WASP-127b, finding two contrasting peaks in the signals of water and carbon dioxide that disturb the tops of the planet's clouds, Science Alert writes.

"Part of the atmosphere of this planet is moving towards us at high speed, while the other part is moving away from us at the same speed. This signal shows us that there is a very fast, supersonic jet wind around the planet's equator," explains lead author Lisa Northmann, an astrophysicist at the University of Göttingen in Germany.

The detected wind speed is many times greater than its gusts on Earth. In the history of observations, the highest wind on our planet was 407 kilometers per hour (on Barrow Island in Australia in 1996).

The planet was discovered in 2016 and has been the subject of intensive research, resulting in some of the most accurate measurements of the exoplanet's atmosphere to date.

It was named WASP-127b. It is slightly larger than Jupiter but has only 16 percent of its mass. The planet is believed to be tidally locked, rotating in time with each revolution around its star in 4.2 Earth days, so one side is constantly hot to over 1000 degrees Celsius, while the other never turns away from the cold night sky.

To measure the composition of WASP-127b's gases, the scientists used an instrument called the cryogenic high-resolution infrared echelle spectrograph on the European Space Agency's Very Large Telescope (VLT) located in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

A closer look at the signals revealed two distinct peaks – one indicating that the material was rapidly approaching the observers, and the other indicating an equally rapid move away. Variations in signal strength between the planet's poles can indicate extreme temperature fluctuations of hundreds of degrees Celsius between dusk and dawn, making WASP-127b a world of hellish extremes (extreme definitions), but still not entirely unfamiliar.

"It shows that the planet has complex weather conditions, just like Earth and other planets in our system," says Fei Yan, an astronomer at the University of Science and Technology of China.

Thrown into this stream, a space tourist would fly around the giant planet in hours, basking in the radiation of a Sun-like star that fills its sky.

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