Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2025

14 MARCH-APRIL 2025 ASTRO PUBLISHING making it ‘puffy’. An international team of astronomers have now made an unexpected discovery: su- personic winds are raging on the planet. “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,” says Lisa Nortmann, a scien- tist at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and lead author of the s t u d y . “This sig- nal shows us that there is a very fast, su- personic, jet wind around the planet’s equator.” At 9 km per second (which is close to a whopping 33,000 km/h), the jet winds move at nearly six times the speed at which the T ornados, cyclones and hurri- canes wreak havoc on Earth, but scientists have now de- tected planetary winds on an en- tirely different scale, far outside the Solar System. Ever since its discovery in 2016, astronomers have been in- vestigating the weather on WASP- 127b, a giant gas planet located over 500 light-years from Earth. The planet is slightly larger than Jupiter, but has only a fraction of its mass, by ESO Bárbara Ferreira Extreme supersonic winds measured on WASP- 127b