Serious Wind Problem

A planet the size of Jupiter that orbits a star 60 light years from earth has the most terrible trouble with wind. Apparently, wind speeds on the so-called exoplanet far oustrip even the worst hurricane or tornado seen on earth and are six times faster than winds on Jupiter. “The exoplanet’s wind speeds probably exceed the speed of sound,” explains Adam
Showman of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), who did the interplanetary weather forecast.” What is more because the speed of sound on such a gas giant is ten times faster than it is on Earth, that means the winds are getting up to 3 kilometers per second.

According to the press release from the University of Arizona, 3 km per second is or 6700 mph. A fact interesting to Sig Figs again for its mix and match approach to units. Not many of us can imagine what 3 kms feels like let alone 6700 mph, but could they not have given the speed in kmh rather than mph. Using the Sciencetext online converter (courtesy of Chaos Labs), that would give us a value of 10782.60 kmh. Of course, regular readers will know how silly such precision in the conversion is, so dropping down to the same sig figs, we would get 11000 kmh. 3 kms only uses a single sig fig (there’s no “.0″, so strictly speaking we should say 10000 kmh). Still, an unimaginably fast gust of wind.

It makes me wonder how they can possibly know how fast those winds are a’blowing to such accuracy in the first place on an object that is 60 light years away. I presume they are observing the wobbling of the planet as it passes in front of its star and recording spectral lines and such like. Nevertheless, as someone who hails from the North East of England I would have to confess that even I would probably roll my sleeves down and wear a coat in such a breeze.