{"id":17851,"date":"2019-12-19T22:06:26","date_gmt":"2019-12-19T14:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/super-puff-planets-add-a-cotton-candy-flavor-to-the-search-for-alien-worlds\/"},"modified":"2019-12-19T22:06:26","modified_gmt":"2019-12-19T14:06:26","slug":"super-puff-planets-add-a-cotton-candy-flavor-to-the-search-for-alien-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/super-puff-planets-add-a-cotton-candy-flavor-to-the-search-for-alien-worlds\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Super-puff\u2019 planets add a cotton candy flavor to the search for alien worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_538658\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-538658\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-538658\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/191219-planets-630x354.png\" alt=\"Kepler 51 planets\" width=\"630\" height=\"354\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/191219-planets-630x354.png 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/191219-planets-768x432.png 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/191219-planets.png 985w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-538658\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">An illustration depicts the sunlike star Kepler 51 and three giant planets that have an extraordinarily low density. (NASA \/ ESA \/ STScI \/ Hustak, Olmsted, Player and Summers)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Readings from the Hubble Space Telescope have shed light on a bizarre class of alien planets that have the density of cotton candy.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The \u201csuper-puff\u201d planets were detected by NASA\u2019s Kepler space telescope in 2012, orbiting Kepler 51, a sunlike star that\u2019s 2,600 light-years from Earth along our Milky Way galaxy\u2019s Orion spiral arm. A couple of years later, astronomers determined that the planets \u2014 known as Kepler-51 b, c and d \u2014 have extremely low densities. Hubble\u2019s recent observations have confirmed those findings.<\/li>\n<li>Each of the three planets has a size in the range of Saturn or Jupiter, but is roughly 100 times lighter in terms of mass. The Hubble team tried to analyze the atmospheres of 51 b and 51 d, but couldn\u2019t get a good reading of any chemical signatures. \u201cWe were clouded out!\u2019 Jessica Libby-Roberts, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said today in a NASA feature about the research.<\/li>\n<li>The planets\u2019 composition may still be a mystery, but that hasn\u2019t stopped Libby-Roberts and her colleagues from theorizing about their origins. They surmise that the planets formed farther out in the Kepler 51 system, and migrated inward. If that hypothesis is correct, the planets\u2019 cotton candy atmospheres should melt away into space over the next few billion years.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Libby-Roberts is the lead author of a paper about the Hubble findings, \u201cThe Featureless Transmission Spectra of Two Super-Puff Planets,\u201d due for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An illustration depicts the sunlike star Kepler 51 and three giant planets that have an extraordinarily low density. (NASA \/ ESA \/ STScI \/ Hustak, Olmsted, Player and Summers) Readings from the Hubble Space Telescope have shed light on a bizarre class of alien planets that have the density of cotton candy. The \u201csuper-puff\u201d planets [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[559,4259,898,4709],"class_list":["post-17851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-exoplanets","tag-hubble","tag-hubble-space-telescope","tag-planets"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17851"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17851\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}