Using all four telescope units of ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile astronomers were able to create a 3D map of the atmosphere of WASP-121b aka Tylos, revealing it has layers that create extreme weather patterns.
Scientists say they are rethinking how the weather works after creating a 3D map of an exoplanet 900 light-years away and discovering a world with jet streams fueling wild storms.
WASP-121b, nicknamed Tylos, is a gas giant with a few things in common with Jupiter, but there are more differences than similarities between these two worlds.
Researchers used all four telescopes at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile to study the climate and weather patterns on Tylos. According to the ESO, this is the first study in such detail of a world outside our solar system.
“This planet’s atmosphere behaves in ways that challenge our understanding of how weather works – not just on Earth, but on all planets. It feels like something out of science fiction,” ESO researcher Julia Victoria Seidel said.
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Tylos rotates counterclockwise so that one side always faces its system’s star. This causes one side of the planet to be scorching hot and always daytime. The opposite side is cool and always night. Because of its closeness to the star, a year on Tylos only lasts about 30 hours.
Using the ESO’s ESPRESSO instrument to combine the light of the four large telescope units into a single signal, the science team was able to detect signatures of multiple chemicals making up layers in Tylos’ atmosphere.
The atmosphere of Tylos is divided into three layers, with iron winds at the bottom, followed by a very fast jet stream of sodium, and finally an upper layer of hydrogen winds. This kind of climate has never been seen before on any planet.
The team found that the atmosphere on Tylos has layers, each with a unique chemical makeup, including iron, sodium and hydrogen.
The graphic below shows the layers: the deepest layer of the atmosphere contains iron, followed by a fast jet stream of sodium moving faster than the planet’s rotation, which accelerates as it moves from the hot to the cool side. Lastly, the upper layer of the atmosphere contains hydrogen blasting out from the planet and overlapping with the sodium jet beneath.
This diagram shows the structure and motion of the atmosphere of the exoplanet Tylos (WASP-121b). The exoplanet is shown from above in this figure, looking at one of its poles. The planet rotates counter-clockwise, in such a way that it always shows the same side to its parent star, so it’s always day on one half of the planet and night on the other.
(ESO/M. Kornmesser)
“What we found was surprising: a jet stream rotates material around the planet’s equator, while a separate flow at lower levels of the atmosphere moves gas from the hot side to the cooler side. This kind of climate has never been seen before on any planet,” Seidel said.
These observations showed jet streams spanning half the planet, churning storms high in the sky as they scream across the hot side of the planet. These storms would rival Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the largest storm in our solar system.
“Even the strongest hurricanes in the solar system seem calm in comparison,” Seidel said.
Astronomers will soon be able to study weather on smaller Earth-sized worlds with ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in Chile’s Atacama Desert.