Seeds
Ideas Sprouting Elsewhere

The universe is a strange place. Scientists just discovered a planet with 20,000 mile per hour winds.

Scientists at the European Southern Observatory have discovered winds traveling twenty thousand miles per hour (33,000 km/h) on a large exoplanet called WASP-127b.

These are the fastest winds ever discovered. By comparison, Neptune holds the record in our solar system with winds once measured at 1,118 mph (1,800 km/h).

“This is something we haven’t seen before,” lead author Lisa Nortmann, an astrophysicist at the University of Göttingen in Germany, said in a statement. We don’t doubt it!

The giant gas planet is a bit bigger than Jupiter, was discovered in 2016 and is located some 500 light-years from Earth.

According to Discover Magazine, “The astronomers first measured how the light of WASP-127b’s host star travels through the planet’s upper atmosphere. Then they probed its composition, finding both water vapor and carbon monoxide molecules there. Finally, they clocked the speed at which these molecules moved.”

To put the speed in perspective, the the winds on WASP-127b travel at 5.5 miles per second. The speed of sound on earth is approximately 0.21 miles per second.

For more, visit Gizmodo. They have one of the better explainers we could find.

More Seeds
Get Tree Dance in your inbox.