This illustration provided by NASA depicts the Sun-like star TOI-791, background left, and two giant planets that NASA's TESS space telescope discovered in its orbit. (Daniel Rutter/NASA via AP)
This illustration provided by NASA depicts the Sun-like star TOI-791, background left, and two giant planets that NASA's TESS space telescope discovered in its orbit. (Daniel Rutter/NASA via AP)
Astronomers have uncovered a pair of giant planets that are lighter than cotton candy 鈥 super-puffs the size of Jupiter.
The featherweight pair 鈥 orbiting a star 1,110 light-years away 鈥 are the to have less density than cotton candy.
That makes them the lightest known planets of their size, said the University of Oxford's George Dransfield.
鈥淭hese two planets have densities comparable to a nice blob of shaving foam, fresh from the can,鈥 Dransfield said in an email. She and her team reported their findings Wednesday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Dransfield suspects these fluffy, wispy worlds are probably white or blue, depending on whether the skies there are cloudy 鈥 no shades of cotton-candy pink. The planets are probably mostly hydrogen and helium, although it will take follow-up observations by NASA's Webb Space Telescope to confirm their chemical makeup.
Detected by NASA鈥檚 Tess satellite over the past decade, these two especially puffy-puffs orbit a star in the southern constellation Volans, known as the flying fish. The researchers studied the planets' orbits using telescopes on Earth to determine their density, from 1,110 light-years away. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).
Jupiter, by comparison, is as much as 35 times denser than these two lightweights.
Considered rare in the cosmos, super-puffs are thought to form around the disk of gas and dust around a newborn star where there is more gas than dust. They shed much of the material over time, stripping down even more.
NASA's tally of worlds outside our solar system currently stands at nearly 6,300 confirmed. Fewer than 40 are super-puffs, according to Dransfield.
鈥淯ltimately, by studying exotic systems containing rare planet types, we add further pieces to the puzzle of planet formation and learn more about our place in the cosmos," she said.
___
The Associated Press Health and 国产诱惑福利 Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute鈥檚 Department of 国产诱惑福利 Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
