GabyThis enormous celestial body is located 1232 light-years away from Earth. The exoplanet WASP-193b is nearly 50 percent larger than Jupiter. Despite this, it is so light and fluffy that its overall density can be compared to that of cotton candy. This is just a little over one percent of Earth’s density.
Exoplanets, or extrasolar planets, are planets outside our Solar System.
Dandelion in the World of Planets
Astronomers They say that if a dandelion could be a planet, it would look just like this.
According to an international team of researchers led by Khalid Barkawi from the University of Liège (Belgium), exoplanets like WASP-193b are quite rare. Moreover, they help us better understand the evolution of planets.
According to the authors of the study, WASP-193b is “the second least dense.” planet “discovered to date, after Kepler-51d, which is much smaller.”
“Its extraordinarily low density makes it a true anomaly among the more than five thousand discovered exoplanets. This extremely low density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants, even under the unrealistic assumption of a coreless structure,” the scientists explained.
According to them, all these strange and wonderful worlds that exist around us help not only to contextualize our Solar System but also to understand how planetary systems are formed and developed.
Gas giants located near their stars are a great tool for this. Our knowledge of celestial body formation allows us to suggest that such planets may have formed elsewhere and migrated inward. Additionally, the radiation from the star also means that many of these worlds are being compressed, the publication reported. Science Alert .
What else is known about the fluffy exoplanet?
WASP-193b is an exoplanet that orbits the star WASP-193, which is similar to Sun This star is approximately 1.1 times more massive than the Sun and 1.2 times larger in radius. It is also very similar to the Sun in terms of temperature and age. However, the planet WASP-193b orbits much closer to its star than any planet in the Solar System. It completes one orbit every 6.25 days.
Astronomers have calculated the density of a fluffy exoplanet: 0.059 grams per cubic centimeter. For comparison, the density of Earth is 5.51 g/cm³. The density of Jupiter is 1.33 g/cm³, which makes sense since it has a lot of clouds. Meanwhile, cotton candy has a density of 0.05 g/cm³—almost the same as that of the planet WASP-193b.
“The planet is so light that it’s hard to imagine a similar solid material,” noted planetologist Julien de Wit from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA).
“The reason it is similar to cotton candy is that both are largely made up of air. The planet is essentially very fluffy,” he added.
What is the composition of the atmosphere of this exoplanet? How does WASP-193b exist in such close proximity to its star, which causes it to expand so much? And in general, how can such a strange, fluffy, old world exist in the Universe? All of this is a great cosmic mystery. “Solving it will require some more observational and theoretical work,” noted Khalid Barkawi.
Therefore, WASP-193b is an excellent object for further research that the team will conduct using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The article dedicated to the research was published by the journal Nature Astronomy.
