A planet has been discovered that is as fluffy as cotton candy. How can such a globe exist?
The newly discovered “super-puff” planet is located 1,232 light-years away from Earth. It is a gas giant that orbits very close to its star. This is already highly intriguing because it indicates a stellar system completely different from our Solar System. In our Solar System, the closest planets to the star are rocky planets, while gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are farther away.
However, in the vicinity of the star WASP-193, there orbits a massive and highly peculiar planet. It is about half the size larger than Jupiter and extremely low in density. Its density is just slightly above 1% of Earth’s density, making it comparable to cotton candy.
How did this extraordinary planet form? This is one of the questions that scientists will be searching for answers to. They described their discovery in an article published on the scientific preprint server arXiv.org.
A super-puffy planet around an ordinary star
The star WASP-193 might seem familiar to us. It is only slightly larger and more massive than the Sun. Its mass is 1.1 times that of the Sun, and its radius is 1.2 times that of the Sun. It is also approximately the same age as our Sun and has a similar temperature.
