Massive, Cloud-Like Planet Discovered That's as Fluffy as Cotton Candy: The galaxy can throw some odd curveballs, but an exoplanet discovered 1,232 light-years away is one of the oddest yet. It's WASP-193b, and while it's nearly 50 percent bigger than Jupiter, it's so light and fluffy that its overall density is comparable to that of cotton candy. https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-cloud-like-planet-discovered-thats-as-fluffy-as-cotton-candy
Studying how the star’s light changes as the exoplanet whips around it allowed Barkaoui and his colleagues to calculate the world’s radius and mass. Its radius is around 1.46 times the radius of Jupiter. But its mass is incredibly small by comparison: just 0.139 times Jupiter’s.
From these properties, the researchers derived the exoplanet’s density: 0.059 grams per cubic centimeter. By comparison, Earth has a density of 5.51 grams per cubic centimeter. Jupiter’s density is 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter, which makes sense – it has a lot of clouds going on. Cotton candy has a density of 0.05 grams per cubic centimeter.
@sciencefiction I love Jeff Vandermeer, China Mieville, Neal Stephenson, Delaney and Wolfe. Would love some recs from the last 10 years or so (I've only read expanse + cixin liu recently).
I’m pretty used to jumping right into new, strange worlds so I rarely get lost, but The Quantum Thief was extraordinarily complex, in a good way. And you could trace ideas in it back to tech in use now. Highly rec the book.