The weather inside our Solar System is tough to track. But even tougher to track is the weather outside our Solar System. Implementing all four of the telescope units of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), a team of researchers has observed the weather on WASP-121b, or Tylos, an exoplanet around 900 light-years away, identifying the layers of its atmosphere for the first time.
Reporting their results in a study in Nature, the team identified three layers of churning, chemical-carrying winds — loaded with elements like iron, sodium, hydrogen, and titanium — laying the foundations for future studies of faraway worlds.
“This planet’s atmosphere behaves in ways that challenge our understanding of how weather works — not just on Earth, but on all planets,” said Julia Victoria Seidel, a study author and researcher at the European Southern Observatory, according to a press release. “It feels like something out of science fiction.”
