A New Planet As Soft As Cotton Candy Discovered: Even Bigger Than Jupiter!

Not all planets have a structure covered with boiling and hard crusts like the Earth we live on. Even in the Solar System, we are neighbors with a gas giant named Jupiter, which will fail this expectation. When I say gas giant, really these planets; they are actually spherical, condensed clouds of gas, and often the planets at the center of these clouds are much smaller in size.

Here is another one of them discovered. Located 1232 light-years from Earth, this new planet was codenamed WASP-193b. However, according to preliminary findings, this planet is quite light despite being 50% larger than Jupiter. It’s also as hard as 1% of Earth’s density. This allows scientists to comment that “it is as soft as cotton candy”.

WASP-193b is almost the same age and temperature as our star, the Sun, and very close to its own star. However, there are still many unanswered questions about it:

The star around which the planet revolves is thought to be 6 billion years old. It is thought that the gases in its atmosphere swelled and therefore its size increased due to both being very close to it and rotating at high speeds. However, scientists have not yet been able to understand the nature of WASP-193b and how it came to be in such a structure, based on the features they observed.

As a matter of fact, thanks to the superior technologies of the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers can more precisely solve the mysteries of this newly discovered planet. Khalid Barkaoui, an academic at the University of Liege, who worked in the team that carried out the study, states that WASP-193b can provide us with important information about the evolution of planets.