Using the powerful CRIRES spectrograph on ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers from the Leiden University, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON), and MIT in the United States, probed these fingerprints in exquisite detail, determining the position of carbon monoxide lines with a precision of 1 part in 100,000. “This high precision allows us to measure the velocity of the carbon monoxide gas for the first time using the Doppler effect,” says team member Remco de Kok.
“HD209458b 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 kilmetres per hour‚” adds team leader Ignas Snellen.
The ferocious winds are due to the extreme temperature differences between the dayside and nightside of the planet, which, at just one-twentieth the Earth-Sun distance orbits with one face locked towards its host. “On Earth, big temperature differences inevitably lead to fierce winds, and as our new measurements reveal, the situation is no different on HD209458b,” says Simon Albrecht.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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