An artists’s impression of WASP-121 b. Credit: Mikal Evans
The planet’s night side likely hosts iron clouds, titanium rain, and winds that dwarf Earth’s jetstream.
“The gas gets heated up at the substellar point but is getting blown eastward before it can reradiate to space,” Mikal-Evans explains.
From the size of the shift, the team estimates that the wind speeds clock in at around 5 kilometers per second.
“These winds are much faster than our jet stream, and can probably move clouds across the entire planet in about 20 hours,” says Daylan, who led previous work on the planet using TESS.
The astronomers have reserved time on the (function(d, s, id){
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