Cyclone Olivia - 403 km/h = 253.5 mph
Severe Tropical Cyclone Olivia was a powerful cyclone that produced the highest non-tornadic winds on record on Barrow Island, 408 kilometres per hour (254 mph), breaking the record of 372 km/h (231 mph) on Mount Washington in the United States in April 1934.
Olivia formed on 3 April 1996 to the north of Australia's Northern Territory. The storm moved generally to the southwest, gradually intensifying off Western Australia. On 8 April, Olivia intensified into a severe tropical cyclone and subsequently turned more to the south, steered by a passing trough. On 10 April, Olivia produced the worldwide record strongest gust on Barrow Island, and on the same day the cyclone made landfall near Varanus Island.
Neptune - 2000 km/h = 1243 mph
Neptune is the eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun in the Solar System. In the Solar System, it is the fourth-largest planet by diameter, the third-most-massive planet, and the densest giant planet. Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth.
Neptune's atmosphere has active and visible weather patterns. These weather patterns are driven by the strongest sustained winds of any planet in the Solar System, with recorded wind speeds as high as 2,100 kilometers per hour (580 m/s; 1,300 mph).
Neptune's weather is characterised by extremely dynamic storm systems, with winds reaching speeds of almost 600 m/s (2,200 km/h; 1,300 mph)—nearly reaching supersonic flow. More typically, by tracking the motion of persistent clouds, wind speeds have been shown to vary from 20 m/s in the easterly direction to 325 m/s westward. At the cloud tops, the prevailing winds range in speed from 400 m/s along the equator to 250 m/s at the poles. Most of the winds on Neptune move in a direction opposite the planet's rotation. The general pattern of winds showed prograde rotation at high latitudes vs. retrograde rotation at lower latitudes. The difference in flow direction is thought to be a "skin effect" and not due to any deeper atmospheric processes. At 70° S latitude, a high-speed jet travels at a speed of 300 m/s.
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| By NASA/CXC/M.Weiss (Harvard) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
IGR J17091-3624 32 million km/h = 20 million mph
IGR J17091-3624 (also IGR J17091) is a stellar mass black hole 28,000 light years away. It lies in the constellation Scorpius in the Milky Way Galaxy.
IGR J17091 was discovered by ESA's INTEGRAL satellite in April 2003.
IGR J17091 is a stellar mass black hole with a mass between 3-10 M☉. It is a binary system in which a star orbits the black hole. Its small size makes it a candidate for the smallest black hole discovered and is near the minimum size limit for a stellar black hole in the current lifespan of the Universe.
Observations by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2011 discovered that it produces the fastest winds ever coming from an accretion disk at 20 million mph (3% of the speed of light). This is 10 times faster than the next highest measured wind speed. According to Ashley King from the University of Michigan "Contrary to the popular perception of black holes pulling in all of the material that gets close, we estimate up to 95 percent of the matter in the disk around IGR J17091 is expelled by the wind.
IGR J17091 also exhibits peculiar X-ray variability patterns or "heartbeats" which are small, quasi-periodic, outbursts repeated over a 5 to 70 second timescale. Similar variability has only been observed in the black hole GRS 1915+105, however, IGR J17091's outbursts are 20 times fainter.
Thanks to Wikipedia: Olivia Neptune IGR_J17091-3624
Curiosity is the single most important attribute with which humans are born. More than a simple desire to discover or know things, curiosity is a powerful tool, like a scalpel or a searchlight. Curiosity changes us. It is also a way to effect change, perhaps even on a global level.