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Unusual giant planet as fluffy as cotton candy spotted by astronomers.
Astronomers say they have uncovered an unusual planet that’s about 50% bigger than Jupiter and somehow still the second lightest planet ever found.
“The planet is so light that it’s difficult to think of an analogous, solid-state material,” said Barkaoui, a postdoctoral researcher of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a news release. Usually, scientists determine mass using a technique called radial velocity, in which researchers analyze how a star’s spectrum, a graph that indicates the intensity of light emissions in wavelengths, shifts as a planet orbits it. “We were initially getting extremely low densities, which were very difficult to believe in the beginning,” said co-lead author Francisco Pozuelos, a senior researcher at Spain’s Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucia, in a news release.
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