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Topics: Space, Science, News, World News
Niamh Shackleton
A newly discovered planet has been compared to cotton candy because of its low density.
Named WASP-193b, the large planet is apparently 50 percent larger than Jupiter and located 1,200 light years from Earth.
While it takes Earth on average 365 days to orbit the Sun, this new planet orbits its star in a super speedy 6.25 days. Impressive!
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WASP-193b is described as having extremely low density, which gives it a cotton candy-like structure.
It gets its name after being found by the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project, which is reported to have found over 150 planets so far.
The project launched in 1999.
The discovery of the new planet was made by an international team led by researchers from the EXOTIC Laboratory at the University of Liège, who say that the planet is the second least dense planet to have ever been discovered.
"Its extremely low density makes it a real anomaly among the more than five thousand exoplanets discovered to date," said Dr Khalid Barkaoui, postdoctoral researcher at the EXOTIC Laboratory at ULiège and first author of the article published in Nature Astronomy.
"This very low density cannot be reproduced by our standard models of irradiated gas giants, even under the unlikely hypothesis of a coreless structure."
Further discussing WASP-193b's low density, Julien de Wit, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-author of the study, said: "The planet is so low density that it is difficult to think of an analogous material in the solid state."
He continued: "This planet is of course not made of cotton candy, but that's the best analogy we have in terms of density."
It's thought that the planet is largely made up of hydrogen and helium, like most of the galaxy's other gas giants.
With WASP-193b's uniqueness in mind, astronomers are at a loss at how and why it came to be.
"We are forced to admit that we cannot explain either the structure or the formation of such a planet," admitted Francisco Pozuelos, astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC, Granada, Spain).
"However, we hope to learn more by studying its atmospheric composition."
Elsewhere, Barkaoui went on to label WASP-193b as a 'cosmic mystery'.
It's thought that the anomaly planet has a density of 0.059 grams per cubic centimeter.
In comparison, Earth's density is 5.51 grams per cubic centimeter. Meanwhile Jupiter is 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter.