Supersonic Winds Blowing on an Extreme Exoplanet

Artist’s visualisation of WASP-127b shows supersonic jet winds that move around the planet’s equator. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

The exoplanet WASP-127b is an unusual world. It is about 30% larger than Jupiter but has just a fifth of Jupiter’s mass. It is an example of a super-puff planet because of its extremely low density. These puffy worlds are so unusual that we don’t know if they would resemble the gas giants of our solar system, or something more exotic, such as a large super-Earth. But a recent study of WASP-127b shows that super-puff worlds can have tremendous winds.

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Are Low Density “Cotton Candy” Exoplanets Actually Just Regular Planets With Rings?

An artist’s conception of Piro and Vissapragada’s model of a ringed planet transiting in front of its host star. They used these models to constrain which of the known super-puffs could be explained by rings. Illustration is by Robin Dienel and courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

There’s a type of exoplanet that astronomers sometimes refer to as cotton candy planets, or super-puffs. They’re mysterious, because their masses don’t match up with their extremely large radii. The two characteristics imply a planet with an extremely low density.

In our Solar System, there’s nothing like them, and finding them in distant solar systems has been puzzling. Now a pair of astronomers might have figured it out.

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