Astronomers have uncovered a pair of giant planets that are lighter than cotton candy, a discovery that underscores how little the cosmos cares for human expectations of size and substance. The featherweight pair orbit a star 1,110 light-years away and are the biggest exoplanets found to have less density than cotton candy, according to the University of Oxford’s George Dransfield. The findings were reported Wednesday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Who Gets to Name the Universe
Dransfield said the planets are the lightest known planets of their size. “These two planets have densities comparable to a nice blob of shaving foam, fresh from the can,” Dransfield said in an email. The language may be playful, but the underlying fact is stark: these are giant worlds with almost absurdly little mass for their scale, identified and interpreted through the machinery of modern astronomy and the institutions that control access to it.
The planets were detected by NASA’s Tess satellite over the past decade. Researchers then studied their 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). The whole enterprise depends on distant instruments, specialized expertise and the authority of scientific institutions to define what counts as knowledge about worlds no ordinary person will ever touch.
What the Instruments Saw
Dransfield suspects the fluffy, wispy worlds are probably white or blue, depending on whether the skies there are cloudy, and said there are 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. Even here, certainty remains gated by more observation, more equipment, more institutional access. The first look comes from one apparatus; the confirmation waits on another.
The two especially puffy-puffs orbit a star in the southern constellation Volans, known as the flying fish. Super-puffs are considered rare in the cosmos and are thought to form around the disk of gas and dust around a newborn star where there is more gas than dust, then 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, and fewer than 40 are super-puffs, according to Dransfield.
Rare Worlds, Managed Knowledge
Jupiter, by comparison, is as much as 35 times denser than these two lightweights. That comparison gives the scale of the discovery, but it also shows how astronomy sorts the universe into categories through measurement, classification and institutional record-keeping. The rarest worlds are not simply found; they are counted, compared and placed into a system of knowledge controlled by agencies, observatories and journals.
Dransfield said the study of these exotic systems matters because it adds “further pieces to the puzzle of planet formation and learn more about our place in the cosmos.” That conclusion was delivered through the formal channels of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, after a decade of detection by NASA’s Tess satellite and follow-up work from Earth-based telescopes.
The result is a pair of giant planets with densities comparable to shaving foam, orbiting a star 1,110 light-years away, and a reminder that even the most distant corners of the universe are made legible through institutions that decide what gets seen, confirmed and published.