What is big, with a fluffy, cotton candy-like composition? Turns out, a planet. <\/p>\n
An international coalition of astronomers has newly discovered an unusual planet, dubbed WASP-193b, that\u2019s about 50% bigger than Jupiter and somehow still the second lightest planet ever found. <\/p>\n
But WASP-193b, located beyond our solar system about 1,200 light-years from Earth, isn\u2019t just a scientific oddity. The exoplanet could also be key to future research investigating atypical planetary formation, according to a study describing the find that published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy. <\/p>\n
This cotton candy planet isn\u2019t alone; there are other similar planets belonging to a class scientists facetiously call \u201cpuffy Jupiters.\u201d The lightest planet ever discovered is the superpuffy Kepler 51d, which is nearly the size of Jupiter but a hundred times lighter than the gas giant. <\/p>\n
Puffy Jupiters have largely been a mystery for 15 years, said lead study author Khalid Barkaoui. But WASP-193b, because of its size, is an ideal candidate for further analysis by the James Webb Space Telescope and other observatories. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe planet is so light that it\u2019s difficult to think of an analogous, solid-state material,\u201d said Barkaoui, a postdoctoral researcher of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a news release. \u201cThe reason why it\u2019s close to cotton candy is because both are mostly made of light gases rather than solids. The planet is basically super fluffy.\u201d <\/p>\n
WASP-193b, which researchers think is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium, was a huge puzzle for researchers to piece together. Because the exoplanet\u2019s density is so light for its size, calculating its mass became a challenge. <\/p>\n
Usually, scientists determine mass using a technique called radial velocity, in which researchers analyze how a star\u2019s spectrum, a graph that indicates the intensity of light emissions in wavelengths, shifts as a planet orbits it. The bigger the planet, the more the star\u2019s spectrum can shift \u2014 but this didn\u2019t work for WASP-193b, which is so light, it didn\u2019t make any pull on the star that the team could detect. <\/p>\n
Because of how small the mass signal was, it took the team four years to gather data and calculate WASP-193b\u2019s mass, Barkaoui explained. Because the extremely low numbers they found were so rare, the researchers completed multiple trials of data analysis, just to be sure. <\/p>\n