Astronomers have discovered a pair of giant planets that are lighter than cotton candy: with super soft density and the size of Jupiter.
This featherweight duo—orbiting a star 1,110 light-years away—is the largest set of exoplanets found with a density less than that of cotton candy.
That makes them the lightest known planets of their size, said Dr. George Dransfield of the University of Oxford.
“These two planets have densities comparable to a good dollop of shaving foam, fresh from the container,” Dransfield said in an email. She and her team reported their findings Wednesday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Dransfield suspects that these fluffy, ethereal worlds are probably white or blue, depending on whether their skies are cloudy; no cotton candy pink tones. The planets are likely made mostly of hydrogen and helium, although follow-up observations with NASA’s Webb Space Telescope will be required to confirm their chemical composition.
Spotted by NASA’s Tess satellite over the past decade, these two especially fluffy planets orbit a star in the southern constellation Volans, known as the flying fish. lResearchers studied the orbits of the planets with telescopes on Earth to determine their density, 1,110 light years away. One light year is equivalent to almost 9.7 billion kilometers (6 billion miles).
By comparison, Jupiter is up to 35 times denser than these two lightweights.
Considered rare in the cosmos, supersponges are thought to form around the disk of gas and dust surrounding a newborn star, where there is more gas than dust. Over time, they lose much of the material, so it shrinks even more.
NASA’s count of worlds outside our solar system currently stands at nearly 6,300 confirmed. Fewer than 40 are super fluffy, according to Dransfield.
“Ultimately, by studying exotic systems that contain rare types of planets, we add more pieces to the puzzle of planetary formation and learn more about our place in the cosmos,” he stated.