So it turns out there's this huge storm raging... on another planet... in another solar system. Isn't it cool that we know that?
“HD 209458b is definitely not a place for the faint-hearted. By studying the poisonous carbon monoxide gas with great accuracy we found evidence for a super wind, blowing at a speed of 5,000 to 10,000 km per hour.”
The storm itself is not surprising, but the fact that we are able to detect it is something of a coup. The planet in question is about 60 percent as massive as Jupiter, orbiting a Sun-like star 150 light years from Earth in the direction of Pegasus. Orbiting at 0.047 AU, the world is tidally locked, with surface temperatures thought to reach about 1000 degrees Celsius on the star-side, while the other remains much cooler. The temperature differential is what kicks up the enormous winds, now measured using the ESO Very Large Telescope and the CRIRES spectrograph, which produced spectra sharp enough “…to determine the position of the carbon monoxide lines at a precision of 1 part in 100,000,” according to team member Remco de Kok.