the Nature astronomy According to a report published in its columns, colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Belgian University of Liège discovered a very strange planet orbiting one of the stars of the Milky Way. Planet WASP-193b is 50% larger than Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, yet it is only one-tenth as dense.
WASP-193b is one of the lowest-mass exoplanets known to date, and only a smaller Neptune-like object, Kepler-51d, is lighter. The newly discovered planet is large and light, making it one of the most unusual planets out of the 5,400 known planets outside the solar system.
Such massive, low-density celestial bodies are rarely found. There is a group called puffy Jupiters, and their identity has been a mystery for 15 years. Planet is also a terrible case in this group
explained Khaled Al-Barqawi, a postdoctoral student at MIT.
We currently don't know where to place this planet in the origin theory. We cannot explain how it became dependent on classical evolutionary models. We can learn something about this by examining the atmosphere more thoroughly.
Francisco Pozuelos, a researcher at the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics, pointed out.
The planet was discovered in the Wide Angle Search for Planets Program, or WASP, which used wide-angle instruments from observatories in Earth's southern and northern hemispheres to study changes in the light of thousands of stars. The measurements were first conducted between 2006 and 2008, then between 2011 and 2012.
The strange planet was observed orbiting the star WASP-193, 1,232 light-years away, which it orbits every 6.25 days, partially blocking its light. They tried to calculate its mass from the speed of rotation and the distorting effect on the light spectrum. It was later examined using a high-resolution telescope, but it was found that the planet did not exert a significant gravitational force on the star. For larger planets, this is remarkable and telling in itself, but in this case, astronomers spent four years confirming surprisingly low mass numbers.
As a result, the average mass of WASP-193b per cubic centimeter 0.059 grams. Jupiter is much denser at 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter, and Earth is 5.51 grams. The exoplanet's mass is closest to that of village cotton candy, which has a density of about 0.05 g/cm3. Scientists pointed out that otherwise, the planet does not consist of strawberry-flavored sugar grains, but rather consists mostly of gases.
How an atmosphere was created tens of thousands of kilometers higher than Jupiter's and what holds it together is currently a mystery. At the same time, it has the advantage that the light gas ball transmits so much light that its precise composition can be easily analyzed.
(Scitech Daily, Space.com website)
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