Research Gallery

Weather map of the transiting hot Jupiter HD 189733b, illustrated by air pressure (color) and wind velocity fields (arrows), as viewed by someone who descends through the planetary atmosphere. The patters are generated primarily by equatorial Rossby waves on the highly irradiated planet. These waves lead to the equatorial super-rotating circulation, which reduces the day-night temperature contrast of this tidally locked exoplanet. The circulation model also explains why the maximum thermal flux from the planet occurs several hours before secondary eclipse, an observational result revealed by the Spitzer Space Telescope (Tsai, Dobbs-Dixon, Gu, ApJ, 2014, 794, 141).