Astronomers discover WASP-193b, a giant planet with a density similar to that of cotton candy
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An international team led by researchers from the EXOTIC Laboratory of the University of Liège, in collaboration with MIT and the Astrophysics Institute in Andalusia, has just discovered WASP-193b, an extraordinarily low-density giant planet orbiting a distant sun-like star.
This new planet, located 1,200 light-years from Earth, is 50% larger than Jupiter but seven times less massive, giving it an extremely low 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 Postdoctoral Researcher at ULiège's EXOTIC Laboratory and first author of the article published in Nature Astronomy.
"Its extremely low density makes it a real anomaly among the more than five thousand exoplanets discovered to date. This extremely low density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants, even under the unrealistic assumption of a coreless structure."
