Astronomers have discovered winds blowing at a speed of about 33.000 kilometers per hour on the planet WASP-127b.

The gas giant planet is located in our Milky Way galaxy, about 520 light-years from Earth. At nine kilometers per second, the jet's winds move almost six times faster than the planet's rotation, the European Space Agency reported.

WASP-127b orbits a star similar to our sun. A light-year is the distance light travels in a vacuum in one year - 9.5 trillion kilometers.

"We discovered extremely strong winds on this exoplanet, the speed of which is surprising," said astrophysicist Lisa Nortmann from the University of Göttingen in Germany and lead author of the study published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

WASP-127b's diameter is about 30 percent larger than that of Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System. But its mass is only 16 percent of Jupiter's mass, making it one of the "fluffiest" planets, with the lowest density of all the planets measured.

WASP-127b has no rocky or solid surface beneath its atmospheric layers.

"Instead, beneath the observed atmosphere lies a gas that becomes increasingly dense and under increasing pressure the deeper we go into the planet," said study co-author David Cont of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

The temperature of the atmosphere is about 1100 degrees Celsius. The polar regions are slightly cooler than the rest of the planet. Like Jupiter, WASP-127b is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium.