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Scientists Discover Giant Planet with the Density of Cotton Candy
An international team of astrophysicists has discovered a giant planet with an extremely low density, orbiting a distant Sun-like star, the Belgian University of Liège announced on Wednesday.
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Dubbed WASP-193b, the new planet is located 1,200 light-years from Earth and is 50% larger than Jupiter but has seven times less mass, giving it a density "comparable to that of cotton candy."
"WASP-193b is the second-least-dense planet discovered to date, after Kepler-51d, which is much smaller," explains Khalid Barkaoui, a researcher at the University of Liège's ExoTIC Laboratory (Belgium) and lead author of the paper published in the journal Nature, quoted in a statement from the university.
"Its very low density makes it a real anomaly among the more than five thousand exoplanets [outside the solar system] discovered to date," says the scientist, who led a team that also included researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain.
The new planet was initially discovered by the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP), an international academic organization that uses two robotic observatories, one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere, to search for extrasolar planets.
The WASP-South observatory detected what it designated as WASP-193, and the aforementioned team used the TRAPPIST-South and SPECULOOS-South observatories.
Measurements made by the observatories revealed that the planet's mass and size were about 0.14 and 1.5 times that of Jupiter, respectively.
The resulting density was approximately 0.059 grams per cubic centimeter, with cotton candy, with a density of about 0.05 grams per cubic centimeter, being one of the materials closest in density to the new planet, according to Europa Press.
"The planet is so light that it is difficult to think of an analogous material in a solid state," says Julien de Wit, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States) and co-author of the study.
"The reason it looks like cotton candy is because both are practically air," he adds.
The researchers admit that the new planet is likely composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, like most other gas giants in the galaxy.
Read Also: NASA appoints its first director of Artificial Intelligence (Portuguese version)
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