On April 10, 1996, a tropical cyclone swept through a small island in Australia and set the world record for fastest wind speed ever recorded on Earth, by measuring winds at 408 kilometers per hour.
Those Earth winds may are puny compared to the swooping gusts that take place on objects outside our own Solar System. Yes, we're talking about wind speeds on exoplanets. More precisely, we're talking about the search for aliens on those exoplanets.
“This is the first time the method we used to do this has been attempted,” Katelyn Allers, a professor of physics and astronomy at Bucknell University, said in a statement. “The idea is similar to how winds could be measured for Earth, but in terms of things that you could determine from afar.”