A huge cotton candy floating through space? Why not? The discovery and research is by an international team led by researchers from the EXOTIC Laboratory of the University of Liège. They work in collaboration with MIT and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia. What have you just discovered? It is called WASP-193b. It’s the planet that looks like cotton candy.
What is it about? From a giant planet of extraordinarily low density. It is known to orbit a distant star similar to the Sun. It is not very close: this new planet is located 1,200 light years from Earth.

Low density
The planet is 50% larger than Jupiter. However, it is seven times less massive. It is a very light density. This characteristic is what gives it extremely density. That is why it is being compared to cotton candy.
«WASP-193b is the second least dense planet discovered to date. “It is only after Kepler-51d, which is much smaller.” This is explained by the postdoctoral researcher at the EXOTIC Laboratory at ULiège and first author of the article published in Nature Astronomy, Khalid Barkaoui. Provide more details of the discovery.
«Its extremely low density makes it a true anomaly among the more than 5,000 exoplanets discovered to date. This extremely low density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants. And not even under the unrealistic assumption of a coreless structure.

Atypical
“We don’t know where to place this planet in all the formation theories we have now. This is because it is an atypical case of all of them. We can’t explain how the cotton candy-like planet formed. Observing its atmosphere more closely will allow us to outline an evolutionary trajectory of this planet.” This is what the astronomer from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Francisco Pozuelos, adds.