A team of astronomers has discovered two massive planets that are so extraordinarily light they make cotton candy seem heavy — and they’re roughly the size of Jupiter.
The two planets circle a star located 1,110 light-years from Earth and hold the record as the largest known exoplanets with a density lower than that of cotton candy.
George Dransfield of the University of Oxford described the discovery, saying the planets rank as the least dense known worlds at their size.
“These two planets have densities comparable to a nice blob of shaving foam, fresh from the can,” Dransfield said in an email. She and her research team published their results Wednesday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Dransfield believes these airy, wispy worlds are likely white or blue in color, depending on cloud cover in their skies — not the pink hues of cotton candy. The planets are thought to consist mainly of hydrogen and helium, though follow-up observations using NASA’s Webb Space Telescope will be needed to confirm what they’re actually made of.
The two planets were detected by NASA’s Tess satellite over the past decade. They orbit a star in the southern constellation Volans, which is known as the flying fish. Researchers used ground-based telescopes to study the planets’ orbits and calculate their density from 1,110 light-years away — a distance that equals nearly 6 trillion miles, or 9.7 trillion kilometers.
To put their lightness in perspective, Jupiter is up to 35 times denser than either of these two newly found planets.
So-called super-puff planets are considered uncommon in the universe. Scientists believe they form in the gas-and-dust disk surrounding a young star in regions where gas is more plentiful than dust. Over time, these planets lose much of their material, becoming even less substantial.
NASA has confirmed nearly 6,300 planets outside our solar system to date. According to Dransfield, fewer than 40 of those qualify as super-puffs.
“Ultimately, by studying exotic systems containing rare planet types, we add further pieces to the puzzle of planet formation and learn more about our place in the cosmos,” she said.
