This is TOI-3757b, which is about the size of Jupiter and is located 580 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Henios
American astronomers have discovered a gas giant exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star with the density of a marshmallow.
This is TOI-3757b, which is about the size of Jupiter and is located 580 light-years from Earth in the constellation Heniochus. It is the smallest and fluffiest planet ever discovered around this type of star.
Red dwarfs are the smallest and faintest M-type stars, cooler than stars like our Sun, but which can be highly active and capable of powerful bursts of radiation that strip nearby planets of their atmospheres. The formation of gas giant exoplanets around such stars is considered difficult.
The researchers, led by Suban Kanodia of the Carnegie Institution for Science, who made the relevant publication in the journal Astrophysics “The Astrophysical Journal,” they said, it remains a mystery how such a sparsely dense planet like TOI-3757b could form around a red dwarf.
The exoplanet in question is believed to have a large rocky core (perhaps ten times the mass of Earth) around which large amounts of gas have accumulated. Its diameter was estimated to be about 150,000 kilometers, slightly larger than that of Jupiter. The planet completes a full orbit around its parent star in just 3.5 days (the length of its year).
Its mass is estimated to be about a quarter of that of Jupiter, or about 85 times that of Earth. Its average density was calculated to be only 0.27 grams per cubic centimeter, less than half the density of Saturn (the lowest-density planet in our solar system) or about a quarter of the density of water (in other words the planet would float comfortably in a huge cosmic…tub) or similar in density to a marshmallow-type confection.
The initial detection of the planet was made by NASA’s TESS space telescope, followed by further observations with various ground-based telescopes. New observations with the large James Webb Space Telescope will follow.
RES-EMP
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