Hurricane Milton approached known maximum storm strength limits on Monday night, with wind gusts briefly topping 200 miles per hour. 

The blistering power of the storm — the second most powerful ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico — prompted calls for a new Category 6 designation.

“This is nothing short of astronomical,” Florida meteorologist Noah Bergren said as Milton reached sustained winds of 180 mph and “gusts 200+ mph.”

“I am at a loss for words to meteorologically describe to you the storm’s small eye and intensity,” he marveled.

“This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth’s atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.”

After forming as a Category 5 storm, Milton on Tuesday was downgraded to a Category 4 after hitting Mexico’s Yucatan Penninsula with a glancing blow. By Tuesday night, it was back to Category 5 again as it churned toward Florida’s gulf coast, putting millions of lives at risk.

After forming in the Gulf of Mexico, Milton rapidly accelerated from a tropical storm with 60-mph winds Sunday morning to a deadly Category 5 hurricane by Monday with sustained winds of 180 mph — exhibiting an incredible trebling of power in only 36 hours.

If the hurricane reached winds of 192 mph, it would have surpassed a rare threshold that just five storms have reached since 1980, USA Today reported.

Its exceptional intensity has prompted calls from some meteorologists to expand the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to include a new Category 6 for hurricanes.

While no such official category exists, professor Michael E. Mann tweeted that “Milton might have actually breached the 192 mph ‘Cat 6′ cutoff.”

Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jim Kossin, a retired federal scientist and science adviser at the nonprofit First Street Foundation, co-authored a study published earlier this year exploring whether there should be a new category for hurricanes.

“We find that a number of recent storms have already achieved this hypothetical Category 6 intensity, and based on multiple independent lines of evidence examining the highest simulated and potential peak wind speeds, more such storms are projected as the climate continues to warm,” they wrote.

However, Fox Weather meteorologist Mike Rawlins told The Post Tuesday that a new category is “unnecessary” and the Saffir-Simpson scale remains the gold standard for measuring hurricanes.

“There are movements out in the meteorological realm calling for the scale to be retired and for a new method of measuring a storm’s intensity to be created since the storm surge and flash flooding often do more damage than the wind alone. But I am not aware of any work happening on that at this time,” he said.

The late Robert Simpson, co-creator of the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale, said in 1999 that creating a Category 6 hurricane would be “immaterial” due to the extreme damage to humans and buildings already caused by Category 5 storms.

Milton is the fourth-strongest Atlantic hurricane on record by barometric pressure — a measure of storm intensity — with central barometric pressure at 897 millibars

Only five hurricanes have dipped below 900 in official records dating back more than 170 years, according to the Miami Herald.