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Excerpt from cosmosmagazine.comAstronomers continue to be puzzled about the formation of the so-called cotton candy planets, and now they’ve found another one that has the least density of any exoplanet yet found.
An international team of astronomers say the new planet, WASP-193b, is about 1,200 light-years from Earth. The gas giant is 50% larger than Jupiter but 7 times less massive.
According to Khalid Barkaoui, a postdcotral researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium and first author of the article published in Nature Astronomy, this extremely-low-density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants.
“WASP-193b is the second least dense planet discovered to date, after Kepler-51d, which is much smaller,” says Barkaoui.
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