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The hunt for extrasolar planets has revealed some truly interesting candidates, not the least of which are planets known as “Hot Jupiters.” This refers to a particular class of gas giants comparable in size to Jupiter but which orbit very closely to their suns. Strangely, there are some gas giants out there that have very low densities, raising questions about their formation and evolution.
These planets also go by the moniker “cotton candy” giants because their density is comparable to this staple confection. In a recent study, an international team of astronomers spotted another massive planet,, a fluffy gas giant orbiting a Sun-like star 1,232 light-years away. While this planet is roughly one and a half times the size of Jupiter, it is only about 14% as massive. This makes WASP-193b the second-lightest exoplanet observed to date.
The research team consisted of astronomers from the Astrobiology Research Unit and the Space Sciences, Technologies, and Astrophysics Research Institute at the Université de Liège, the Oukaimeden Observatory at Cadi Ayyad University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía , the European Southern Observatory , the Center for Space and Habitability at the University of Bern, the Center for Computational Astrophysics, the Cavendish...
Artist’s impression of the hot Jupiter exoplanet WASP-69b, which orbits its star so closely that its atmosphere is being blown into space. Credit: Adam Makarenko/W. M. Keck Observatory The researchers suspect that WASP-193b is composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, like all gas giants, and that these form a hugely inflated atmosphere that extends tens of thousands of kilometers farther than Jupiter’s atmosphere. These findings cannot be explained by conventional theories of planet formation and evolution, which makes WASP-193b an ideal candidate for follow-up observations.
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