Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2025

22 MAY-JUNE 2025 ASTRO PUBLISHING ing intricate weather patterns across the planet’s atmosphere. The discov- ery opens the door for detailed stud- ies of the chemical makeup and weather of other alien worlds. “This planet’s atmosphere behaves in ways that challenge our under- standing of how weather works — not just on Earth, but on all planets. It feels like something out of science fiction,” says Julia Victoria Seidel, a researcher at the European South- ern Observatory (ESO) in Chile and lead author of the study, published in Nature . The planet, WASP-121b (also known as Tylos), is some 900 light-years away in the constellation Puppis. It’s an ultra-hot Jupiter, a gas giant or- biting its host star so closely that a A stronomers have peered through the atmosphere of a planet beyond the Solar Sys- tem, mapping its 3D structure for the first time. By combining all four telescope units of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), they found powerful winds carrying chemical el- ements like iron and titanium, creat- by ESO Bárbara Ferreira First 3D observations of an exoplanet’s atmosphere