Scientists spot alien world ‘like something out of science fiction’

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Scientists have mapped the atmosphere a planet outside of our solar system in 3D for the first ever time.

And they have found a world unlike anything we have ever seen: powerful winds that carry chemical elements in complicated, intricate patterns across the atmosphere. A vast jet stream reaches across half the planet, churning the atmosphere up as it crosses the side of the planet that it always facing its sun.

Scientists say that the new 3D understanding of the planet represents a major breakthrough for our understanding of the atmosphere and weather of alien worlds. But it also challenges our current understanding of weather, they say, because it is so unusual.

“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,” said Julia Victoria Seidel, a researcher at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile and lead author of the study, in a statement.

The planet itself is known as WASP-121b, or Tylos. It sits around 900 light years away, and is an ultra-hot Jupiter, so close to its star that each year lasts only 30 of our hours.

Astronomers were able to use the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to probe the planet’s atmosphere and were shocked by what they found.

“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,” Dr Seidel said. “Even the strongest hurricanes in the Solar System seem calm in comparison.”

Other surprises came in the data itself. Scientists found there was titanium in the jet stream – previous observations suggested it was absent, but it may have been hidden down in the atmosphere.

“It’s truly mind-blowing that we’re able to study details like the chemical makeup and weather patterns of a planet at such a vast distance,” says Bibiana Prinoth, a PhD student at Lund University, Sweden, and ESO, who led a companion study.

The work is described in a new paper, ‘Vertical structure of an exoplanet’s atmospheric jet stream’, published in the journal Nature. A companion paper looking specifically at titanium, ‘Titanium chemistry of WASP-121 b with ESPRESSO in 4-UT mode’, is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.