“The most spectacular result is the presence of strong jets, with speeds of up to 400 meters per second, which are located under the aurorae near the poles,” says Cavalié. These wind speeds, equivalent to about 1450 kilometers an hour, are more than twice the maximum storm speeds reached in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and over three times the wind speed measured on Earth’s strongest tornadoes.

“Our detection indicates that these jets could behave like a giant vortex with a diameter of up to four times that of Earth, and some 900 kilometers in height,” explains co-author Bilal Benmahi, also of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux. “A vortex of this size would be a unique meteorological beast in our Solar System,” Cavalié adds.

Satellite observations have revealed an unprecedented ‘space hurricane’ in Earth’s upper atmosphere, hinting that such events could occur on other planetary bodies.

Scientists have previously documented hurricanes in the lower atmospheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Similar phenomena have even been spotted on the Sun. But the existence of space hurricanes — hurricane-like circulation patterns in planets’ upper atmospheres — has been uncertain.

Earth’s upper atmosphere cooks up a storm.

A first-ever “space hurricane” was spotted whirling above the Earth, scientists said.

The 600-mile-wide mass of plasma occurred several hundreds of miles above the North Pole, according to a study in the journal Nature Communications.

“Until now, it was uncertain that space plasma hurricanes even existed, so to prove this with such a striking observation is incredible,” said Mike Lockwood, a space scientist at the University of Reading and co-author of the study, in a statement.