In Earth's upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 275 miles (442 km) per hour, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 1,200 miles (2,000 km) per hour. Those, however, are a mere breeze compared to the jet-stream winds on a planet called WASP-127b.Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 20,500 miles (33,000 km) per hour on this large gaseous planet, located in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind on any known planet."There is an extremely fast circumplanetary jet wind found on the planet. The velocity of the winds is surprisingly high," said astrophysicist Lisa Nortmann of the University of Göttingen in Germany, lead author of the study published on Tuesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.More than 5,800 planets beyond our solar system – called exoplanets – have been discovered. WASP-127b is a type called a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant that orbits very close to its host star. WASP-127b's diameter is about 30% larger than Jupiter, our solar system's largest planet. But its mass is only about 16% that of Jupiter, making it one of the least dense – puffiest – planets ever observed.What is WASP-127b?WASP-127b is a gas giant planet, which means that it has no rocky or solid surface beneath its atmospheric layers. Instead, below the observed atmosphere lies gas that becomes denser and more pressurized the deeper one goes into the planet, according to astrophysicist and study co-author David Cont of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.
