Beyond Neptune: NASA excited by new colossal ghost planet that defies science – Euro Weekly News
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By Marc Menendez-Roche •
Updated: 14 Feb 2025 • 7:49 • 3 minutes read
Space Oddity: NASA confirms the existence of WASP-193b – A giant, marshmallow-like planet beyond Neptune!
Credit: Shutterstock, Vadim Sadovski NASA has finally confirmed the existence of WASP-193b. And hold onto your space helmets, because it’s a very big discovery… A ‘Ghost Planet’ that shouldn’t exist according to experts. Scientists worldwide are baffled. How did it get there? What else are we blissfully unaware of? Read on to find out more.For years, theories about hidden planets lurking in deep space have fueled wild speculation – Planet X, Planet 9, Nibiru, the list goes on and on. Could a mysterious rogue world be out there, evading detection? Could science be missing something massive, something it can’t yet understand or explain?… Now, NASA-backed astronomers have found something so strange, so unexplainable, it’s throwing planetary science into complete turmoil. Meet WASP-193b – a colossal, puffy giant that defies every rule in the book. It’s 50% bigger than Jupiter but barely there at all, floating like a cosmic ghost and lies in a distant star system. Scientists admit they have no idea how it formed, and no existing theories can explain it.Is it a missing link in planetary evolution? A glitch in the simulation? Proof that the universe is playing tricks on us?The deeper we look into space, the weirder it gets, and the more we realise that everything we think we know is wrong. What else don’t we know?Discovered by a team from MIT, the University of Liège in Belgium, and other institutions, this colossal oddball is 50% larger than Jupiter but barely has any weight to it. Scientists describe its density as absurdly low – comparable to a literal marshmallow drifting through space.“Finding giant planets with such incredibly low density is extremely rare,” says Khalid Barkaoui, the MIT postdoctoral researcher leading the study. “We call them ‘puffy Jupiters,’ but this one is on a whole new level. We don’t know how it exists.” If you tried to land on WASP-193b, you’d probably just fall straight through.Among the 5,400+ exoplanets discovered so far, WASP-193b is officially one of the fluffiest ever found. Thanks to its sheer size, it’s in a class of its own. Imagine a planet-sized candy floss, slowly drifting through the cosmos. “It doesn’t fit into any of our existing models,” admits Francisco Pozuelos, a senior researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia. “This thing is a planetary paradox – it just shouldn’t be there.”Astronomers first spotted the planet through the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP), an international collaboration that scans thousands of stars using robotic telescopes. Their job? Catch hidden planets when they pass in front of their host stars. And boy, did they hit the jackpot with this one.Once astronomers crunched the numbers, the results were staggering. WASP-193b’s mass is just 14% of Jupiter’s, while its density sits at a near-nonexistent 0.059 grams per cubic centimetre. For reference:Yes, you read that right. This planet is only slightly denser than cotton candy.WASP-193b is likely made up of hydrogen and helium, much like other gas giants, but its atmosphere appears to stretch tens of thousands of kilometres beyond Jupiter’s own – like a cosmic balloon expanding in slow motion.The research team is deploying a special technique developed by MIT’s Julien de Wit, which will analyse the planet’s atmosphere to determine its temperature, composition, and pressure at different depths.Read more original news in English from around Europe. Read more US news. Share this storySubscribe to our Euro Weekly News alerts to get the latest stories into your inbox!
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Marc is a writer, teacher, and language enthusiast.
With a background in business and legal communication and an interest in educational neuroscience, Marc has spent over a decade teaching and writing.
Now, as part of the team at Euro Weekly News, Marc enjoys diving into entertaining topics and stories that matter to the community.
When he’s not writing, Marc loves practising martial arts, playing football, cooking up a storm in the kitchen, or spending quality time with friends and family, but above all, Marc enjoys spending time with his son, Macson. For every matter to exist must start in spiritual realm…some stuck there and fail transformation to physical matter like earth or us…we refers to them as ghostly..using infrared we can sport them….I think someone hasn’t been taking their tablets. This could be a valuable hydrogen / helium resource in our future.Nah! It’s where parts go to dieAmazing!Der ….. Beyond the orbit of Neptune…. I should say so, it’s 1200 light years awaywrong planet, this one is not the habital plane tbut a gas giant in our solar systemWow! Where is the Internet scraping up some of these “so called” people and their comments? Are we getting a direct line from Wasp 193b? What a bunch of kooks.Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Website
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