Astronomers Have Made the First Weather Map of a Planet Beyond Our Solar System

In an astronomical first, researchers have mapped the weather patterns of a planet beyond our Solar System—revealing a seriously gnarly forecast. A team based out of the University of Warwick clocked the wind speeds of gas giant HD 189733b, located 63 light years away in the constellation Vulpecula, at a rip-roaring 5,400 miles per hour—seven times the speed of sound.

"This is the first ever weather map from outside of our solar system," team lead Tom Louden said in a statement. "Whilst we have previously known of wind on exoplanets, we have never before been able to directly measure and map a weather system."

The blustery conditions on HD 189733b are generated by its tight orbit around its host star, which is part of the two-star system V452 Vulpeculae. The gas giant is right up in its star's face, about 180 times closer than Mercury is from the Sun. It completes an orbit every 2.2 days, and its star-facing side is estimated to be about 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit.

The insane temperatures of HD 189733b, known as a "hot Jupiter," create extreme wind patterns that flow along thermal gradients from the planet's hot, starward face to its cooler dark side. While many weather maps of other hot Juptiers have been created based on indirect information, Louden and his colleagues are the first to create a model based on direct observational evidence of the wind flow's effect on atmospheric sodium emissions. This data was sourced from from the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) in Chile.

"HD 189733b's velocity was measured using high resolution spectroscopy of the Sodium absorption featured in its atmosphere," Louden explained. "As parts of HD 189733b's atmosphere move towards or away from the Earth, the Doppler effect changes the wavelength of this feature, which allows the velocity to be measured."

This new research on HD 189733b, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, stands to greatly improve our understanding of exoplanetary meteorology. Indeed, it has already shown us that the fastest winds in the Solar System—the 1,500-mile-per-hour ragers of our homeboy Neptune—are small shakes compared to the full-on aeolian onslaughts of HD 189733b. So the next time you encounter a particularly aggressive gust of wind this winter, have a little perspective. If you weren't eviscerated, then cosmically speaking, it wasn't so bad.