The universe is big, there will be any star, can you associate soft and light cotton with a planet?
In 2017, astronomers discovered a giant exoplanet, WASP-107b, a hot, Jupiter-like gas giant that is only 9 million kilometers away from its parent star, an orange dwarf, so astronomers estimate the temperature of WASP-107b at around 1,000 degrees Celsius.
Its solid core mass is much lower than the mass required to form a huge gas envelope around giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn, and more than 85% of the mass is contained in the gas layer. By using the radial velocity method, we know that WASP-107b has about one-tenth the mass of Jupiter, or 30 times that of Earth, but that it is about the same size as Jupiter.
This is the least dense exoplanet we currently know, and astrophysicists call these planets "super puffs" or "marshmallows."
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="41" > what a "super puff" planet is</h1>
The biggest difference between "super puff" planets and other planets is their density, their mass can be several times the mass of The Earth, but the hydrogen atmosphere or helium atmosphere on the planet can expand like Jupiter, you know, Jupiter mass is about 318 times that of The Earth.
Through the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have also found two "super puffs" in the Kepler-51 system, Kepler-51b and 51d, the primary star of this planetary system, a helio-like star located 2615 light-years from Earth, in the direction of Cygnus.
Astronomers have found that the two planets are about the same size as Jupiter, have lower masses than Earth, and both have densities below 0.1g/cm^3 because they are too far away for current tools to detect their color, and we can only imagine for ourselves.
Astronomers wonder how their atmospheres are maintained. Judging by the spectral features they present as they pass in front of the host star, their atmospheres have haloline clouds or photochemical smog, the main components of which are hydrogen and helium, and they are also shrouded in a thick layer of methane haze, just like Titan.
So, what are the circumstances and factors that made the "Super Puffs" planet born?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="43" > the birth of the planet "Super Puffs"</h1>
In the physical model of planet formation, it is difficult to see a giant planet formed very close to the star, let alone a low-mass planet, so the "super puff" planet should form farther away from the star and then slowly approach the main star over time.
This proximity process is called "disk migration", in which the planet first forms from a flat disk of gas and dust that surrounds the star, and when a massive planet appears, its gravitational pull begins to act on the disk, and the disk acts back on the planet, reducing its rotational energy.
So the planet begins to move closer to the star, and this inward migration only stops when the planet is close to the inner edge of the disk, and eventually the disk disappears, leaving a large planet to rotate around the star at close range. This may be the formation of the planet Super Puffs.
After comparing the spectral data from Kepler-51b and 51d with other planets, the researchers found that there was a certain correlation between planetary clouds and planetary temperatures, and the lower the planet's temperature, the thicker the planet's clouds.
Kepler-51b and 51d are also being rapidly losing mass, with Kepler-51b losing tens of billions of tons of mass per second, and astronomers estimate that in billions of years, they will become "mini-Neptunes."
It can be inferred that the "fluffiness" of the planets seems to be related to the age of the planetary system, our solar system has existed for 5 billion years, and the Kepler 51 system has only been born for 500 million years.
But none of this explains why the "Super Puffs" planet is so light, and perhaps the james Webb Space Telescope that will be launched in the future can give us an idea of what these "Super Puffs" planets are made of.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="32" > other weird planets in the universe</h1>
Of course, the universe is too big, and there are many planets that are as "weird" as "super puff" stars, such as the ice and fire planet LHS 3844b.
This is a rocky exoplanet 48.6 light-years away from our Earth, it has no atmosphere, its surface may be covered with dark lava, and it is tidally locked with the host star, so one side is always facing the main star, and the temperature on this side can reach 800 °C, and the other side is as low as -250 °C.
That is to say, one side of it is enough to vaporize rock, and the other side is close to absolute zero, so that the side facing the host star has been undergoing active volcanic movement, a sight that cannot be imagined on Earth.
There is also a planet GJ 1214b, which scientists have named "Wet Water World". It was almost completely covered by water, only a small part of the land, and the entire planet was wrapped in a thick, damp atmosphere.
But its oceans are completely different from those of ours on Earth, because because of the planet's steam atmosphere and the strong pressure from its core, its water forms a type of hot ice known as "Ice Seven," a block of ice with a strange consistency that scientists believe is certainly unfit for life.
In addition, it is very close to the host star, only 2 million kilometers away, which makes its surface temperature as high as 200 degrees Celsius.
TrES-2b is also odd, a planet 750 light-years away from Earth, its biggest feature is that it is darker than charcoal, it is the darkest planet ever discovered by humans, other planets reflect only a small amount of light, and this planet reflects only 1% of the main star's light, looking like a black hole.
At first, scientists thought that it was a measurement and calculation error, but after checking, it was found that the measurement data were correct, in this case, it can only be assumed, some people think that this black is due to the presence of a large amount of gaseous sodium and titanium oxide, and some people think that it is missing ammonia clouds.
With our current knowledge, the universe is boundless, and scientists and astronomers have always discovered many new objects, struck by their uniqueness and unusualness.