Charles C. Barnes, age 13,

What is the weather of Jupiter like?

Using images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers can now estimate the weather of a Jupiter-like exoplanet as it orbits a Sun-like star that is about 60 light-years away.

For the first time, scientists can map the atmosphere of a planet orbiting its parent star, by observing changes in the planet’s infrared brightness over time. The planet is tidally locked to its star like our moon is to Earth, which means that the same side of the planet always faces the star, and it is divided into permanent day and night. However, because the night side is nearly as hot as the day side, scientists say that fierce winds must be redistributing the heat from the starlit side to the dark side. In addition, the hottest part of the planet is shifted from the location that receives the most starlight. The results of this NASA-funded research will appear in the May 10 issue of the journal Nature.

“Now that we have this brightness/temperature map, we can learn a lot about this planet. We now believe that this planet is a very windy place; the speed of the west-to-east winds is probably several kilometers /second. We reached this conclusion because the brightest spot on the planet is not right in the middle of the map. The point in the middle of the map receives the most starlight, but it is not the hottest,” explained Jonathan Fortney, a planetary scientist at the Carl Sagan Center, Mountain View, Calif. who works at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. He is also a co-author of this study. ”The hottest (brightest) spot is offset by about 30 degrees, meaning that winds are blowing this hottest spot downstream.”