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The galaxy can throw some odd curveballs, but an exoplanet discovered 1,232 light-years away is one of the oddest yet., it's so light and fluffy that its overall density is comparable to that of cotton candy. It's just a hair over 1 percent of the density of Earth. It's an absolute"Its extremely low density makes it a real anomaly among the more than five thousand exoplanets discovered to date.
Studying how the star's light changes as the exoplanet whips around it allowed Barkaoui and his colleagues to calculate the world's. Its radius is around 1.46 times the radius of Jupiter. But its mass is incredibly small by comparison: just 0.139 times Jupiter's. Animation showing how radial velocity is measured, one of the ways a planet can affect the light of its star. (, but they offer some clues as to how such fluffy worlds can come to exist. Close proximity to a star can heat the atmosphere, puffing it out, especially if that atmosphere was predominantly
So this poses some problems. The star is thought to be up to 6 billion years old; while there could be some mechanism for internal heat puffing up WASP-193b's atmosphere, the observed properties of the exoplanet cannot be recreated using sophisticated planetary evolution models.
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