Buzz
Earth's weather can be intensely destructive, but aside from rare occurrences like fire tornadoes, it's mostly just water falling from the sky. If you want to witness truly mind-blowing weather, you’ll have to leave this planet. The extreme conditions found on other planets and stars make hurricanes feel like a mild breeze.
10. Glass Storms
Situated 63 light years from Earth, HD 189733b is a “hot Jupiter.” It's 13% more massive than Jupiter and orbits 30 times closer to its star than Earth does to the Sun. As the closest planet of its kind to our solar system, scientists have been able to gather a lot of information about it.
The surface temperature reaches a scorching 980 degrees Celsius (1,800 °F), with winds blowing at a staggering 6,400 kilometers (4,000 mi) per hour. These extreme conditions cause the atmosphere to evaporate, with the planet losing up to 600 million kilograms (1.3 billion lb) of matter every second.
Although this planet is relatively nearby in galactic terms, a bit of ingenuity was required to analyze its infernal weather. Scientists utilized the Hubble Space Telescope to capture light while the planet was next to the star and again when it passed behind. This shift allowed them to determine the planet’s unique color, which they named “azure blue.”
Similar to Earth's blue sky, HD 189733b’s color comes from light scattering in the atmosphere. However, this hue is not due to air but rather to silicate particles. This results in rainstorms made of glass, which travel sideways at five times the speed of sound, not water.
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9. Green Crystal Rain
Rain doesn’t only occur on planets. One of the most stunning rain phenomena in the galaxy happens around a proto-star called HOPS-68, a young star similar to our Sun, located approximately 1,350 light years away from Earth. Despite the collapsing cloud of dust surrounding it, tiny fragments of olivine—a green crystal used in jewelry—are raining down as the star forms.
Like many precious stones, olivine forms in extremely high temperatures. However, the cloud surrounding HOPS-68 is extremely cold, around –170 degrees Celsius (–280 °F). Scientists believe the olivine formed near the star before being ejected by jets of gas. Now it falls to the nascent star, cascading “like glitter,” as one astronomer described it.
This discovery, made by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, also provides insight into a mystery within our own solar system. Similar crystals were recently detected in outer comets, suggesting that these gems may have formed in the early stages of our solar system and were trapped in comets after being ejected from the solar system's center.
8. Mercury's Cloud Phenomenon
Alpha Andromedae, known also as Alpheratz or Sirrah, is the brightest star in the Andromeda constellation. Additionally, it holds another remarkable title—it was the first star ever discovered to possess a weather system.
The discovery began with a puzzling observation. Alpha Andromedae was one of the first stars whose surface could be examined closely, revealing patches of mercury with varying compositions over time. In fact, the concentration of mercury in different areas fluctuated by factors of up to 10,000.
On our Sun, spots and compositional changes are caused by magnetic forces. However, Alpha Andromedae does not have a magnetic field, prompting astronomers to seek an alternative explanation. After seven years of observation, they found that the mercury concentration pattern shifted over time, suggesting dynamics similar to the weather patterns on Earth and planets like Jupiter.
The shifting of mercury across the star's surface indicates the presence of mercury clouds. However, solving this mystery only raised another. It appears that mercury is the only element in the star capable of forming clouds, and scientists are still uncertain as to why this is the case.
7. Intense Heat Waves
HD 80606b is another massive 'hot Jupiter', four times the mass of Jupiter itself. This planet stands out due to its highly eccentric orbit. In its 111.4 Earth-day orbit, it travels to a distance 0.88 times that from Earth to the Sun. The closest approach to its star is 30 times nearer and lasts only a few hours. A team from Geneva Observatory studied HD 80606b and found that as the planet nears its star, the brightness observed from above the planet's surface increases by a factor of 825.
The excess radiation causes the planet's temperature to more than double in just six hours, soaring from 527 to 1,227 degrees Celsius (980 to 2,240 °F). This represents the greatest temperature variation ever recorded on any planet. However, the nearly 1,000-fold increase in solar radiation doesn't fully account for the drastic temperature change—it would take far longer than six hours for a temperature shift like this to occur on Earth.
Scientists discovered that the sudden surge of radiation triggers an explosive-like reaction in the atmosphere facing the star. This creates winds reaching speeds of 17,700 kilometers (11,000 miles) per hour across the planet's surface. The planet's rotation then stirs up massive, swirling shockwave storms that redistribute the heat.
6. Brown Dwarfs
Brown dwarfs are formed in a similar way to other stars, but they lack the necessary mass to start nuclear fusion. This makes them relatively cool—some even cooler than the human body. Because of their low temperatures, they don't shine very brightly, which has made them difficult to detect. However, thanks to the incredible advancements in telescope technology, astronomers have used two powerful instruments to map the weather patterns of a brown dwarf.
By pointing the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes at the brown dwarf 2MASSJ22282889-431026, or 2M2228 for short, located 39.1 light years away, scientists observed changes in its brightness every 90 minutes as it rotated. The use of both telescopes allowed them to analyze different infrared wavelengths, revealing that the timing of these brightness variations shifted depending on the specific infrared frequency being examined.
The differences in brightness are caused by clouds drifting across the surface of the dwarf in storms that are as large as Earth itself. With the dwarf's surface temperature ranging from 600–700 degrees Celsius (1,100–1,300 °F), the clouds are made up of unusual materials, such as sand and droplets of molten iron.
5. Stellar Hailstorms
NGC 1333-IRAS 4B is a fledgling solar system, with its central star still enveloped in a thick cloud of gas and dust. Within the heart of this envelope lies a denser material disk that will likely give rise to planets. This central disk is undergoing what can best be described as a hailstorm. Enough water to fill Earth's oceans five times over is falling onto the disk.
The central disk is hotter than the surrounding gas cloud, and when the ice chunks reach it, they evaporate. This causes the water vapor to emit infrared light, which is why NASA's Spitzer telescope was able to detect it.
This discovery adds to our understanding of how planetary systems develop. The “steamy” stage of a star’s life is short-lived, but the presence of water in this phase allows scientists to estimate the size, density, and temperature of the surrounding disk. Over time, the vapor will likely refreeze, possibly forming comets.
4. Magnetic Tornadoes
Unusual weather is not hard to find on stars. Our own Sun is home to magnetic tornadoes, some of which are five times larger than Earth. If one of these tornadoes were on Earth, it would stretch halfway to the Moon. These tornadoes are composed of superheated gas and plasma, reaching temperatures of up to 2 million degrees Celsius (3.6 million °F), with winds blowing at 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per hour.
The first solar tornado captured on film was in 2011 by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Since then, more of these tornadoes have been observed, and they often precede coronal mass ejections (CMEs). CMEs are powerful bursts of plasma and radiation that erupt from the Sun and are also linked to sunspots. Understanding how these magnetic phenomena relate to one another is a complex puzzle currently being explored by NASA’s supercomputers.
Not all magnetic tornadoes are as massive as 125,000 miles high, but there are around 11,000 smaller ones constantly rotating across the Sun. These smaller, more frequent tornadoes were first discovered in 2012. They may offer insight into why the Sun’s corona is much hotter than its photosphere, despite being further from the core—a long-standing mystery known as the coronal heating problem.
3. Weather In Space
Space isn’t just home to planets and stars; it also experiences its own weather. Coronal mass ejections and solar flares generate winds made of charged particles, which when they reach Earth, create the spectacular aurora borealis. However, they can also interfere with electronic systems, particularly satellites. Starting in 2014, the British Meteorological Office began offering a 24-hour space weather forecast.
While the Sun sends powerful winds toward Earth, it also provides protection from a much larger storm. For the past 45,000 years, our solar system has been passing through a cloud of interstellar gas that spans 30 light years. The Sun’s magnetic field, known as the heliosphere, acts as a shield, much like Earth’s magnetic field protects us from solar wind. Recent findings indicate that this cloud is more turbulent than anticipated, possibly because we are nearing its edge, which we may exit within the next 1,000 years.
The most intense space weather phenomenon is galactic wind. These winds, driven by star formation and destruction, expel hot gas and dust from galaxies. They can push material across hundreds of thousands of light years, and even break free from a galaxy’s gravitational pull. Galactic winds can alter the rate of star formation and even change the structural layout of a galaxy’s disk.
2. Venus
Venus’s typical weather is far from pleasant. The planet’s dense atmosphere makes it the hottest in our solar system. A thick layer of clouds, extending 20 kilometers (12 miles) high, constantly releases a rain of sulfuric acid, but the raindrops evaporate before they even touch the surface.
On top of that, Venus is also subject to massive space explosions. These immense events, known as “hot flow anomalies,” are caused by the solar wind, which typically flows around the planet. However, the solar wind doesn’t always move uniformly. Plasma pockets can accumulate where the wind meets the boundary of Venus’s atmosphere, and these pockets can grow to be as large as the planet itself.
1. Saturn And Jupiter
One of the most well-known weather phenomena in our solar system is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a colossal storm that was first observed in the early 1600s. Measurements from the late 1800s suggested it spanned as much as 40,000 kilometers (25,500 miles). However, by the time the Voyager probes passed by in the late 1970s, its size had shrunk by about half. As of 2014, the Hubble Telescope recorded its diameter at 16,500 kilometers (10,250 miles), down from Hubble’s initial measurement of 20,950 kilometers (13,020 miles) in 1995.
The data suggests that the Great Red Spot is not only shrinking, but it’s doing so at an accelerated rate. While the cause of this rapid reduction remains unclear, scientists suspect it may be due to small eddies disrupting the storm’s internal structure. The Juno probe, set to reach Jupiter in July 2016, could provide some insights into this phenomenon.
Jupiter isn’t the only gas giant experiencing giant storms. In December 2010, the Cassini probe began observing a newly-formed lightning storm on Saturn. The storm moved westward, creating a vortex behind it. Over the span of 201 days, it traveled completely around Saturn and eventually collided with its own wake, causing it to dissipate.
