Astronomers have discovered supersonic winds on a giant gas planet located over 500 light-years from Earth.

In a study published Tuesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomers who have been studying the planet’s weather since 2016 said the findings show this is “the fastest wind ever measured in the jet stream orbiting the planet.”

“This is something we haven’t seen before,” said Lisa Nortmann, a scientist at the University of Göttingen in Germany and lead author of the study.

The team said they mapped the weather on planet WASP-127b using CRIRES+ instrument — consisting of a spectrograph and an adaptive optical system — on The Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory.

The findings showed that WASP-127b, which is slightly larger than Jupiter but has only a fraction of its mass, has a jet wind moving almost six times faster than the speed at which the planet rotates. By comparison, the fastest wind ever measured in the Solar System was found on Neptune, moving at just 0.5 km per second, the scientists said.

The team mapped a surprisingly complex weather system on the planet by tracking the speed of molecules – they noticed a double peak, indicating that one side of the atmosphere is moving towards us and the other away from us at high speed. This indicates that there is a strong wind current circulating around the planet.

The researchers concluded that strong jet winds around the equator would explain this unexpected result and show that the planet has complex weather systems like Earth and other planets in our solar system.

“Understanding the dynamics of these exoplanets helps us investigate mechanisms such as heat redistribution and chemical processes, improving our understanding of planet formation and potentially shedding light on the origin of our solar system,” says David Cont of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, and co-author of the paper.

Of the discovered exoplanets so far only a few dozen have been recorded directlyaccording to OUR. Scientists hope that further research will reveal whether the young planets formed in their current location or migrated from somewhere else – and how they might interact with each other.