You’d expect the strongest winds to be on the hottest, most active planets. Jupiter or Saturn, with all their swirling storms and bands of color, get most of the attention. The fastest winds in the entire solar system, though, blow on a far quieter world: Neptune.
Neptune is the farthest planet from the Sun, more than 30 times farther than Earth. It gets so little sunlight that the surface temperature drops to about -200°C. And yet its atmosphere whips around at speeds up to 1,300 miles per hour - faster than the speed of sound, faster than a fighter jet at full burn.
What’s strange is that we don’t really know why. There’s barely any sunlight to drive the weather, and the planet doesn’t seem to have much internal heat. Some part of Neptune’s deep structure is still pushing winds to supersonic speeds, billions of miles from anything that could obviously power them.
